15 TV Shows That Were Poorly Disguised Fetishes

1. Euphoria (2019)

Sam Levinson’s neon nightmare wants to be a bruising portrait of addiction, loneliness, and teenage collapse, but its most criticized habit is the way pain keeps getting polished until it looks expensive. The show can be genuinely powerful when it stays with Rue’s self-destruction, yet it too often wanders into glossy humiliation, designer misery, and bodies framed like mood-board objects. The result is prestige TV that sometimes feels less like empathy and more like surveillance with glitter on it. | © HBO

2. The Idol (2023)

The Idol arrived promising a savage takedown of pop-industry exploitation, then somehow looked like exploitation wearing a fake mustache. Lily-Rose Depp’s Jocelyn is supposed to be trapped inside a machine that consumes women, but the show spends so much time posing her for that same machine that the critique collapses into self-parody. Sam Levinson and The Weeknd built a series about manipulation, and the camera kept acting like it had joined the cult. | © HBO

3. Elite (2018)

Netflix’s Spanish murder soap began with a sharp hook: class conflict, corruption, and scholarship students thrown into a private-school shark tank. Then Elite discovered that luxury, bodies, blackmail, and locker-room lighting were its real operating system. The show still has flashes of delicious melodrama, but Las Encinas eventually starts to feel less like a school than a boutique nightclub where every crime scene doubles as a perfume ad. Subtlety was expelled several seasons ago. | © Zeta Producciones

4. Baby (2018)

Baby is one of the harder shows to defend because its source of inspiration was already grim: a real scandal involving minors, wealth, and sexual exploitation in Rome. The series tries to frame itself as a stylish teen drama about loneliness and double lives, but the polish becomes part of the problem. When dangerous adult worlds are filtered through soft lighting, fashion, and pop melancholy, the line between condemning exploitation and packaging it gets disturbingly thin. | © Fabula Pictures

5. Totally Spies! (2001)

On paper, Totally Spies! is a hyperactive cartoon about three Beverly Hills girls saving the world in color-coded catsuits. In practice, the internet has spent years noticing how often its spy plots drift into restraints, transformations, mind control, bizarre body changes, forced makeovers, and other suspiciously specific scenarios. One episode could be dismissed as cartoon weirdness; the pattern is what made the show infamous. For a kids’ action comedy, it had an oddly crowded basement. | © Marathon Media

6. iCarly (2007)

iCarly was sold as goofy web-show chaos, and plenty of it still works as broad Nickelodeon comedy. The problem is how much of the Dan Schneider era now looks different after years of scrutiny, especially the recurring visual jokes, food bits, humiliation gags, and suggestive material involving young performers. The show’s whole premise was kids filming themselves for attention, which already feels eerie in hindsight. What once looked random now feels uncomfortably curated. | © Nickelodeon Productions

7. Total Drama (2007)

Total Drama cleverly spoofed reality TV by turning teenage archetypes into animated contestants, then trapping them inside humiliation challenges for laughs. That satire gives it cover, but the show also leans hard on embarrassment, body jokes, voyeuristic confessionals, swimsuit framing, and the pleasure of watching cartoon teenagers get degraded for entertainment. Its sharpest joke is that reality TV is gross; its weakest defense is that it seems to enjoy the grossness a little too much. | © Fresh TV

8. Big Mouth (2017)

Big Mouth wants credit for being frank about puberty, and sometimes it earns it with surprisingly honest jokes about shame, anxiety, and growing up inside a body that has turned traitor. The trouble is that “honest” and “relentless” are not the same thing. When a show about middle-school kids keeps pushing explicit sexual dialogue and body-focused comedy as its main engine, the educational framing starts to look like a very convenient permission slip. | © Titmouse

9. Toddlers & Tiaras (2009)

Toddler & Tiaras did not need horror lighting to become one of reality TV’s most upsetting cultural artifacts. The premise was already enough: very young children styled, judged, coached, and costumed for a competitive spectacle built around adult ideas of beauty and performance. TLC presented it as pageant-world access, but the show often felt like America watching itself lose an argument with basic decency. The sequins were bright; the aftertaste was rancid. | © Authentic Entertainment

10. Dance Moms (2011)

Dance Moms sold discipline, ambition, and showbiz pressure, but its real product was children crying under adult expectations. Abby Lee Miller’s screaming became the meme, yet the more unsettling material was the way young dancers’ bodies, costumes, breakdowns, and private insecurities became weekly content. The series understood that outrage kept people watching, then kept finding new ways to manufacture it. Talent was the excuse; emotional extraction was the business model. | © Collins Avenue Entertainment

11. 13 Reasons Why (2017)

Netflix positioned 13 Reasons Why as an urgent conversation about teen mental health, but the first season’s shock tactics quickly swallowed that mission. Its most controversial scenes were not just “dark”; they were staged with a level of intensity that critics, parents, and mental-health experts argued could become harmful spectacle. The show wanted to expose cruelty, bullying, assault, and grief, yet it often seemed addicted to the very trauma it claimed to process. | © Paramount Television Studios

12. Skins (2007)

The British Skins had genuine cultural bite because it let teenagers be reckless, funny, cruel, wounded, and smarter than the adults pretending to supervise them. Still, its legacy is tangled with a camera that often treated teen chaos as both warning sign and party invite. The show was rawer and more character-driven than many of its imitators, but its brand of drugs, sex, breakdowns, and beautiful self-destruction helped build the template that later shows abused shamelessly. | © Company Pictures

13. American Horror Story (2011)

Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk’s anthology has always understood horror as fashion, theater, kink, trauma, camp, and meat grinder all at once. That can make American Horror Story thrilling, but it also means the series regularly turns suffering into décor and bodies into set pieces. Latex suits, asylums, freak shows, hotels, cults, surgeries, and blood-soaked glamour keep circling the same impulse: if it shocks, sexualizes, or disturbs, frame it like a magazine spread. | © 20th Television

14. Victorious (2010)

Victorious should be remembered as a talented cast trapped inside a bright, loud performing-arts sitcom; instead, it is now impossible to separate from the larger reckoning around Schneider-era Nickelodeon. The jokes, costumes, food gags, and physical bits involving teenage performers have aged badly, especially once former child stars began speaking more openly about that environment. Hollywood Arts was supposed to be a dream school. Rewatching it now, some scenes feel like evidence left in plain sight. | © Nickelodeon Productions

15. Made in Abyss (2017)

The cruel genius of Made in Abyss is that it wraps nightmare fuel in storybook beauty: soft faces, lush backgrounds, haunting music, and a pit that promises wonder before delivering suffering. That contrast is also why the series has drawn so much discomfort. Its treatment of child characters can feel punishing, exposed, and weirdly fixated, as if innocence itself is being fed into the machine for atmosphere. The world-building is astonishing; the gaze is harder to excuse. | © Kinema Citrus