What is Insatiable, the new Netflix series, about? I’ve watched five episodes (there are 12), and I can’t really tell you.

I can tell you the plot: In a snoopy Georgia town, a plus-sized high school senior named Patty (Debby Ryan) punches a homeless man who tries to steal her chocolate bar, has her jaw wired shut, loses weight, catches the eye of an attorney named Bob (Dallas Roberts) whose passion is coaching beauty-pageant contestants, and hijinks ensue. But I can’t tell you what the animating principle, the reason for existence, the beating heart of the series is — what drove Lauren Gussis, who was previously a writer and producer on Dexter, to create it — because all I’m getting so far is the final line of the trailer: “This is some wacky s-t.”

Our golden age of television is also the golden age of tone. The Emmy awards continue to categorize series as either comedies or dramas, but the goal now, the brass ring, is to be non-binary — to defy easy labels, to create a unique tone made up of compound tones. So Stranger Things, for example, is sci-fi/mystery/nostalgia; it’s wry/spooky/funny/sweet. Killing Eve is thriller/character study; it’s psychologically complex/surprising/violent/sexy, its tongue both in its cheek and not. Santa Clarita Diet (which stars Drew Barrymore, Patty’s heroine) is zombie/domestic dramedy/social commentary; it’s gross/jolly.

But for tone to work, those disparate sounds must add up to one overall harmonic. You can’t name the tone, but you recognize it. So far, for me, Insatiable — which arrives on Netflix on Aug. 10 — is just noise.

The trailer makes it look as if the show has a through-line: Patty wants to take revenge on everyone who mocked her weight. But that’s not true. Instead, the characters veer herky-jerkily through their days, changing motivations in mid-sentence. I practically had to watch the show in a neck brace to not get whiplash.

Patty proclaims, “Skinny is magic,” and then proves and disproves that willy-nilly. The characters make speeches about body positivity, but the show puts only acceptably thin girls in bikinis, and films them in slo-mo. Patty’s bestie Nonnie (Kimmy Shields) may be a lesbian; this is played for snarky laughs for four episodes, and then for pathos in the fifth. Patty is vicious, vulnerable, clueless, and/or smart, depending not on the needs of any given episode, but of any given beat in any given scene. This is not complexity — it’s confusion.

Insatiable inevitably will be compared to the AMC series Dietland, in which a plus-size heroine, Plum (Joy Nash), who works at a teen magazine, gets involved with a shady self-actualization group, which may be tied to a feminist/terrorist organization that’s murdering serial offenders of womankind. The difference is, though Dietland has tone (angry/righteous/humane), the characters have cores. Even when they don’t know why they do what they do, they feel like people rather than collections of contradictory quirks.

Wacky s-t is a lot harder than it looks. Even the Coen brothers don’t get it right every time. Insatiable, on the surface, behaves as if it has tone — “Look at me, being all unquantifiable and zany! I’m a TV version of whack-a-mole!” But without substance, all that clanging and banging is Unsatisfying.

Johanna Schneller is a Toronto-based pop culture writer and a freelance contributor for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @JoSchneller

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