Sick Product of a Sick System

Just what I expected

Unshakable, witty and deeply felt, the film will be paying emotional dividends for a long, long time.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

Starved had some of the best/complex characters I've seen in along time. And the show focuses on a problem that a lot of Americans ignore. When they might have the problem themselves. Like the main character I used to have an addiction to chocolate till I found a way to kick it. Cause it was not OK! IF anyone wants to talk about boycotts. I say I'm gonna boycott FX for taking the only original and fresh show off the the air. They obviously couldn't take the pressure from people that probably haven't even watched the show and if they did they didn't do it with an open mind. What happened to free expression. It's not like the show didn't have fans! I hope some other network with sense picks it up.

Network: FX; Genre: Dark Comedy, Drama, Content Rating: TV-MA (strong language, strong crude humor, nudity and simulated sex); Perspective: Cult Classic (star range: 1 - 5); Seasons Reviewed: Complete Series (1 season) Sam (Eric Schaeffer) is a commodities trader at a top New York firm as well as an anorexic, compulsive overeater. Billie (Laura Benanti) is an aspiring underground singer/songwriter (whose fans "prefer her gay") as well as a recovering anorexic. Dan (Del Pentecost) is a married stay-at-home writer whose wife won't let him watch the game in peace as well as a morbidly obese compulsive overeater. Adam (Sterling K. Brown) is a New York police officer as well as an active bulimic who isn't above shaking down vendors for something to binge on. Boy, you know this will be fun… The brainchild or star/writer/director/creator/executive producer Eric Schaeffer, "Starved" is about the most noble commercial failure to come down the pipe in some time. If it doesn't quite live up to the lofty concept that Schaeffer is attempting to get his arms around here (and the flaws are numerous), the show is so bold, so unique, so bravely open, so well made and with such a gung-ho attempt at a level of crude humor you rarely see in live-action TV, that it manages to fling itself in just one season into cult classic territory.Something that wouldn't see the light of day anywhere except FX, "Starved" is a show for people, like me, who are tired of all their romantic comedy characters being quirky, wacky neurotics and want to see some people who are genuinely mentally disturbed. And the show isn't just a dark comedy about a group of friends with eating disorders (which itself would be enough to raise the ire of the Hyper-sensitive Special Interest Group of the Week), but it brings a never-before-seen male perspective to the subject. After decades of being told that whining, crying and self pity was the only way to depict a bulimic, "Starved" takes eating disorders like a man. With anger, self-loathing, wicked humor and twisted sex. You'd never see a character like the sadistically mean-spirited group leader (Jackie Hoffman) in a Lifetime Original Movie, that's for sure. Then again this show probably wasn't relevant decades ago, as Schaeffer's endearingly effeminate Sam can also be seen as a comment on the feminization of the modern man that has brought them to this point. With "Starved" Schaeffer exorcises his own frustration with compulsive overeating, shaping it into a dark, bittersweet comedy.While largely uneven in the department of actual laughs, the show succeeds be being an nakedly intimate exploration of it's characters. But "Starved" can be divided evenly down the half of it that works - Sam and Billie - and the half that doesn't - Dan and Adam. Schaeffer has put so much heart and texture into his own story lines that he leaves the rest of the cast underwritten. He is aided from the very beginning here by Benanti who (in one of the funniest female lead performances since Paget Brewster in "Andy Richter Controls the Universe") can take any scrap Schaeffer throws her and make it a laugh riot. Watch her take a lame bit in the pilot involving a scale and turn it around and into a laugh at the last second. Shaeffer himself is also great in the show. His deliveries, his expressions - the guy could about have carried the entire thing himself.Then there are the gross-out gags, which reach a level of surreal outrageousness that top the Farrelly brothers in their prime. This eye-popping assault includes stuff like TV's first colonic backfire, massive testicular swelling and a mysterious man (Darrell Hammond) who can purge at will. Few shows have made me squirm in nauseous discomfort like this one.Interlaced parallel with all this, like a "Sex and the City" for the sick and miserable, is the ironically more successful romantic comedy elements: Sam's obsession with the women in a British shoe commercial, Sam's unrequited affection for his bisexual friend, and a late season arc with a Yoga instructor (Robyn Cohen, a dead-ringer for Jennifer Westfeldt) whose new-age lifestyle tests him.The show finds a rhythm in the final episodes, where our group meet their fate - and disappointing it is only the women who seems happy. Everything about "Starved" was bittersweet. It defied convention and challenged an audience that is used to happy endings and laugh lines - exactly as you would expect from FX's first venture into comedy. "Starved" was flawed, uneven and underwritten but it had a foothold into a potentially robust, untapped, universe and deserved an audience. It's cancellation leaves us with the open-ended desire to know what happens next to these characters - always the sign of a good series.* * * / 5

This is a program I was rooting for.Why? Because eating disorders are serious business and we are all effected by them in one way or another or know of someone who is - whether is chasing down that "last five pounds" or trying to dump 200. This IS all because we are all trying to fit into a media programmed perfection first, rather than health second.I know that television situation (and dark) comedies have helped America face many serious problems and tolerances such as racism, homosexuality, bigotry, the elderly and even weight. "All In the Family" this ain't.I'm not getting the biting satire I was led to believe this would be. After a few episodes, at some points, it seems darned mean-spirited towards its characters. Don't get me wrong, I love dark comedies the most, and this isn't on that level to me at all. It's not smart, edgy or sexy.I can say ... that it points out the depths many go through for it's subject matter, but I'm not laughing at the way it is portrayed - or feeling sympathetic for any of the characters.A thumbs down - so far - for me with a bit of an open mind wish for a re-tooling if it gets to another season.

Yes, it can be hard to watch, but it's great. Yes, people do have eating disorders. Yes, our culture is very messed up in terms of it's relationships with food. These folks lean on each other to help them make it day by day while living with their problems, and trying, trying to get better.Every character on the show is despicable, and yet entirely sympathetic at the same time. They are written as humans, and humans can be very messed up creatures indeed.I've struggled with eating issues, and I think this show is right on the money in terms of the self-loathing that comes with trying to attain body perfection. The fact that it's funny as well as touching is just a bonus. Great show.