Canned TV Show #28: Starved (2005)

I recently watched an episode of Hot Ones where Oscar-nominated actor Sterling K. Brown absolutely demolished ten increasingly spicy chicken wings, which served to remind me of two things: one, Sterling K. Brown is awesome, and two, apparently he was once on a show called Starved where he played a bulimic cop who shakes down delivery drivers for their food. I was already well aware of the first thing, but when host Sean Evans brought up the second thing, I thought to myself, there’s no way that was real, right?

Well, as it turns out, Brown did indeed appear in a show called Starved where he played a bulimic cop, all the way back in 2005 on a series that only survived for seven episodes. It seemed to me to be the perfect Canned subject; short-lived, mostly-forgotten, but still featuring a couple of actors who would go on to greater fame and fortune. So here we are, talking about Starved.

Starved premiered in 2005 on FX, in a programming block called the “Other Side of Comedy,” alongside another scrappy indie show, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Being in the future, we know that Sunny has been on the air for a staggering 16 seasons and counting, whereas Starved only lasted one very short season. I like to imagine an alternate universe where Sunny tanked and Starved became a 16-season juggernaut, which I can only assume is a universe where the air is toxic and everyone looks like a naked mole rat or something. But was Starved as bad as all that? Did it deserve to slip into obscurity while its block-mate became a comedy institution?

The series was created by actor and filmmaker Eric Schaeffer, who also plays Sam, one of a central quartet of characters struggling with an eating disorder. His particular brand is compulsive overeating and anorexia, vacillating between scarfing down Ne-Mo’s chocolate cakes and working out obsessively. He’s joined by Brown as Adam, the aforementioned bulimic cop; Billie (Laura Benanti), an anorexic musician also figuring out her sexuality; and Dan (Del Pentecost), a binge-eating novelist who keeps canceling his gastric bypass appointment.

They all attend a “support” group called Belt Tighteners that seeks to motivate its members with shame and guilt, calling them out for their afflictions and insulting them (Jackie Hoffman as the group’s caustic leader, dispensing vicious pearls of anti-wisdom, is easily the funniest part of the show). Throughout the series, they acknowledge the ways that their disease threatens to destroy their lives, but find it impossible to change.

In a lot of ways, Starved feels ahead of its time. It’s nominally a comedy, but one that deals with a serious subject and often blurs the lines of drama, something we’re still not sure what to do with at a time when critics and fans accuse a show like The Bear of awards category fraud for racking up wins as a comedy despite not being particularly funny. These sorts of seriocomic shows have only grown more popular in the almost two decades since Starved aired, and it’s not implausible to think it might have lasted longer if it came out a decade or so later.

Schaeffer evidently based much of the series on his own struggles with eating disorders and addictive behaviors, and each of the principal actors also had their own dalliances with EDs and body image issues that made their way into the show. It takes its characters’ disorders seriously, depicting them in a way that feels more grounded and less salacious than we usually see. It shows that people with EDs can come from all walks of life, not just teenage girls.

In other ways, Starved feels very much like a product of the time in which it was made. There’s casual sexism, racism, and homophobia that wasn’t uncommon in series produced back then, but feels very regressive today. This is particularly evident with Sam, who seems to pretty much only value women based on whether or not he wants to fuck them. The show clearly wants to be about four flawed people who aren’t necessarily meant to be likable all the time, but it also clearly wants us to feel for them and recognize that their actions are a result of their disease and not entirely within their control, and I get all that. But at times, they behave so selfishly and with such delusion, in ways that don’t feel related to their disorders, that it becomes hard to empathize with them.

Adam definitely behaves abominably at times, abusing his power as a cop to feed his disorder, and he faces some hefty consequences for it. Sam is by far the worst offender, a major asshole with serious main character syndrome who uses pretty much everyone he comes into contact with. Schaeffer plays his dickish character to the hilt with a James Woods-esque energy (though I’m not sure if that’s a compliment or not, depending how you feel about that particular actor), but I think this might be a case where the character would’ve been better served by having someone besides the show’s creator in the role. At times it has that feeling that some self-penned roles have where he’s supposed to be irresistibly charming to women who should really be able to read his red flags from a mile out. He’s definitely not afraid to make himself vulnerable, but at times it still smacks of a bit of an ego trip. But hey, Hollywood’s a tough business, if you have to write your own roles to make it, then that’s what you gotta do.

If Starved has a larger message, I think it’s that we’re all sick in our own ways, made so by our image and status-obsessed society. We’re all desperate for meaning and answers to our problems, as illustrated by Sam’s glomming on to any person or movement that might help him lose weight or feel better about his own self-loathing. We just can’t seem to get out of our own way long enough to be able to find true connection, mostly because finding real connection means showing someone else parts of ourselves we don’t like to look at. By the end of its scant seven episodes, our four main characters are all at an inflection point, one where they may be able to break out of their patterns and truly heal. But they’ve all been there before, many times, and there’s no guarantee this time will be any different.

As for how our cast did after Starved, the results were a bit mixed. Brown’s career has exploded in the past decade or so, with Emmy wins and his first Oscar nomination to be decided in March. This was Benanti’s first TV role, but she was already in the midst of an extremely successful career in theatre and film, with multiple Tony nominations and one win. Pentecost seems to have stopped acting back in 2010, his final role on a couple episodes of Gravity, another Schaeffer co-creation. As for Schaeffer himself, he seems to have taken some time off in the mid-2010s, but released his most recent directorial effort Before I Go back in 2021. I’m not sure why his career never seemed to take off; he’s clearly a talented guy, and he’s made a number of indie films over the years, but nothing that seemed to catch any sort of zeitgeist wave. I guess it just goes that way sometimes.

So, should it have stayed on the air? I’m kind of torn about this one. It’s not that Starved is a bad show, really. I think its tonal mix was probably too jarring for TV viewers in 2005, but it could’ve done better in a different climate. There’s just something about it that doesn’t quite connect and give it the sense of a show with a lot of longevity. Obviously, we can’t judge a show from almost twenty years ago by the social mores of today, and its creakier elements are more just a product of its time than a fatal flaw. And it’s not that shows can’t center around unlikable characters; some of the greatest shows ever made have been led by antiheroes, from Breaking Bad to The Sopranos to Deadwood, so I’m having trouble putting my finger on why it is that Starved doesn’t quite work for me. Maybe its characters don’t cross the gap between unlikable but compelling and just plain selfish and irritating. If you want to find out for yourself if Starved was worth saving, a YouTube channel called VHSofDeath uploaded the whole series.