Starved

Starved is an American television sitcom that aired for one season on FX for seven episodes in 2005. The series was about four friends who each suffer from eating disorders, who met at a "shame-based" support group called Belt Tighteners. Its characters included those with bulimia, anorexia, and binge eating disorder. Eric Schaeffer created the show as well as writing, starring in and directing it, based upon his own struggle with eating disorders. In addition to his own life experiences, Schaeffer also drew upon the experiences of the other members of the principal cast, each of whom coincidentally had struggled with food issues of their own.

Starved was the lead-in of FX's hour-long "Other Side of Comedy" block with It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. FX executives wanted to use the two series to begin building comedy programming and broaden the network's demographic. The series debuted on August 4, 2005, to poor critical reviews and was cancelled in October 2005, when FX picked Sunny over Starved for renewal.

Characters

 * Sam (Eric Schaeffer) is a commodities trader who suffers from anorexia and compulsive overeating. His interests quickly turn into obsessions. Despite being with several different women during the series, he is secretly in love with Billie.
 * Billie Frasier (Laura Benanti) is an anorexic and bulimic who also has issues with alcohol abuse. Billie is bisexual and was raised by two gay fathers. Formerly a ballerina, the original impetus for her eating disorders, she is now a moderately well-known singer-songwriter.
 * Dan Roundtree (Del Pentecost) is a novelist and compulsive overeater. The only married person among the main characters, he worries that his weight will lead his wife to leave him. He continually schedules and then cancels gastric bypass surgery.
 * Adam Williams (Sterling K. Brown) is a police officer with bulimia. He abuses his authority to extort food from restaurants and delivery people, which eventually costs him his job.
 * Belt Tighteners Group Leader (Jackie Hoffman) leads the support group that the friends attend. Sarcastic and abrasive, she constantly berates the four friends for their failed attempts at dealing with their food issues. Following her tirades, she leads the group in a chant of the support group's slogan, "It's not OK!"

Production
Series star Eric Schaeffer created Starved. Schaeffer, who is in recovery for alcohol and drug addiction and describes himself as having "anorexic thinking," drew on his own experiences with eating disorders and the experiences of other people he knew in creating scenarios for the series. Other cast members also struggled with food issues. Benanti spent three years fighting anorexia while she danced on Broadway. Pentecost, who weighed 310 pounds at the time of filming, contributed stories from his own life to the series, including a scene in which his character weighs himself on a postal scale because he is too heavy for a conventional bathroom scale. Brown was fat as a child and describes himself as being "haunted by the 'fat kid mentality'." Producers only discovered that each of the principal cast members had food issues after the casting process was completed.

Starved and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia were developed for FX under the auspices of FX president John Landgraf, who sought to expand the network's viewership by providing a wider variety of programming. The shows were the network's first attempts at sitcoms following the short-lived 2003 series Lucky. FX at the time was known primarily for its edgy dramatic series. Bruce Lefkowitz, then executive vice president of Fox Cable Entertainment, outlined the strategy: "We kind of staked out a unique space in dramas that are very different from everybody else’s, so the next natural evolution is to do something in the comedy space." The network ordered seven episodes of each series.

Starved was shot in the spring of 2005 in New York City using a single-camera setup and without a laugh track. It and Sunny were the first shows that FX produced inhouse.

Reception
Starved generated controversy even before its premiere. A number of specialists in the treatment of eating disorders expressed concern that the program would either make light of or glamorize eating disorders. Others, however, felt that Starved might focus attention on eating disorders as a serious medical condition. The National Eating Disorders Association called for a boycott of the show and claimed that Diageo (makers of Tanqueray) and Nautilus agreed to pull their advertising. Schaeffer responded to the controversy, saying "there is some difficult stuff to watch. But I know my spirit and intention are good."

Starved premiered to an audience of 1.54 million viewers, scoring a Neilsen rating of 0.8 and a 2 share among adults 18–49, the network's target demographic. Reviews were unfavorable. Variety echoed the slogan of Belt Tighteners in dismissing the series as "not OK." Noting the series' edgy content, Variety allows that "Pushing the envelope in terms of standards is all well and good, assuming that series earn the right to do so." Starved, it says, did not earn that right. The series' "stabs at poignancy feel unconvincing and forced" and "from an emotional standpoint there's seldom a truthful note."

The Washington Post concurred in this assessment, describing the premise of the show as "Hey, what happens if you take the characters from Seinfeld and give them eating disorders?" While crediting Starved for "a few inventive laughs," the language and sexuality of the show are described as "exceptionally coarse" and "outrageous for cable television, even later at night." Worse than these issues, the Post felt that Schaeffer neglected to develop the characters in favor of coming up with contrived situations for them. "[T]his failure to build understanding into the show dooms it to emptiness, with a sour aftertaste. As if you had just, you know, hurled."

The New York Times credited the series for its bold premise and noted that the show provided some insight into eating disorders while offering "a few flashes of clever dialogue and satire." Ultimately, however, the Times found that "Starved relies too heavily on sight gags and gross-out farce." The Los Angeles Times found the show "vexing" for being "at once assured and shallow, accomplished and unconvincing, well-acted and empty." The review singles out Schaeffer's character Sam as "especially unappealing" and points to Schaeffer's roles as creator, producer, writer and director as "an object lesson in the wisdom of a system of checks and balances." Perhaps most damningly, in noting Schaeffer's experiences with addiction, the reviewer writes that "just because you’ve had an experience doesn’t mean you have anything interesting to say about it or are able to articulate whatever interesting thing you have to say."

New York called it the Best Show You Probably Never Watched. NBC used a clip from the second episode in "The Most Outrageous TV Moments".

FX canceled Starved in October 2005. FX president John Landgraf told Variety, "The show had a lot of fans, so it was tough to choose [between it and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia]. Ultimately, we felt that we're just not in a position to spread our resources. We launched our dramas one at a time, and launching two [comedies] like we did this summer just didn't work out as well." As of 2023, Sunny is in its sixteenth season on sister network FXX.