AMC's Dietland is an incisive satire of fat phobia

The Hollywood Reporter

The AMC drama from Marti Noxon based on Sarai Walker's 2015 best-selling novel on fat acceptance and feminist vengeance is, says Inkoo Kang, "a riveting whirligig of a show: a tale of self-discovery, a manifesto about sizeism, a screed against consumer capitalism and a mystery about a radical feminist terrorist cell that uses vigilante violence to punish rapists, pedophiles and…magazine editors. The anger it evinces against misogyny in the first two episodes is raw, searing and justified, but also a tad unfocused. It's still unclear whether the terrorists throwing bad men off planes and buildings seem kinda goofy because they were written to be that way, or because sympathetic villains are hard to write."

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• Dietland bites off a whole lot for one TV series, but Noxon makes it feel like part of a cogent whole
• It doesn't do justice to the novel, "delivering a hodgepodge of interesting feminist musings and irritating surrealist whimsy"
• This Is Us and Drop Dead Diva have addressed these topics, but not with this much searing and biting accuracy
• Dietland has a compelling story and lead character, but it's muddled by various interweaving conspiracies and plot machinations
• If Dietland wants to be truly scathing, it would do better to streamline its fury and focus at more specific targets
• Dietland scripts were rewritten in response to the Harvey Weinstein scandal
• Marti Noxon has changed the industry with her work on badass and angry female characters, from Buffy to UnReal
• Noxon: "Some people have said to me, 'How were you so prescient?'"
• "There's nothing wrong with being fat," says Dietland's plus-sized star Joy Nash
• Julianna Margulies considers her Dietland character to be "a little bit like Trump"
• Margulies agreed to playing a different kind of role because of the challenge