Maddie’s Secret Review: Obnoxious Comedy May Leave You a Little Sick

Ever gone to a bar and a restaurant, and there’s been a really obnoxiously loud party there that insists on screech-laughing at the constant barrage of in-jokes they hurl at each other, and if that wasn’t bad enough they keep looking at you like you should be getting the joke too, and then rolling their eyes while you stare so intently at your drink that the heat of your gaze could evaporate it in seconds?

That’s basically the experience of enduring Maddie’s Secret, an excruciating satire of a dead media genre. Really, it’s an unacknowledged comedy remake of a quietly important piece of television, 1986’s Kate’s Secret. In the NBC Movie of the Week, Meredith Baxter plays a suburban housewife whose seemingly ideal life hides a self-destructive mental health issue that expresses itself as bulimia.

The very idea of making a spoof of 1980s movies-of-the-week is so incredibly misguided that it’s not even punching down. It’s punching at empty air, and yet that’s exactly what writer/director/star John Early does in Maddie’s Secret. He plays Maddie, a food influencer who everyone either loves or is jealous of. She has an adoring husband (Eric Rahill) and a best friend (Kate Berlant) who stares at her with lustful intent across the studio of Gourmaybe, the culinary video channel at which they both work. That’s also the domain of Emily (Claudia O’Doherty), the on-air talent who despises Maddie’s actual cooking ability. But no one despises Maddie as much as Maddie, whose self-hatred expresses itself through body dysmorphia and bulimia even as she gets the fame and adoration she deserves.

Much as Early has credited multiple influences, the overall arc of the story is such a direct lift from Kate’s Secret that it’s a minor miracle that its writers, Denise DeGarmo and Susan Seeger, haven’t sued for credit. He crossdresses for the part, but that’s about all the real effort he puts into a performance that’s stunningly superficial and pointless. Effort is also actually the real difference between Kate’s Secret and Maddie’s Secret, in that the people behind Kate’s Secret meant well. If changing tastes make it seem a little cheesy now, it was rooted in a push to make people understand that eating disorders are often based in deep, lifelong psychological trauma. Even in the face of the modern habit of lazily mislabeling anything more than a decade old as “camp,” the moment when Kate sits in group therapy and breaks down as she explains that she sticks her fingers down her throat to make the bad feelings go away is genuinely powerful. Maddie’s Secret just turns that into a tawdry joke, further curdled by Early’s thoughtless performance of Maddie as a pastiche of Reagan-era femininity.

And, yes, there is something oddly distasteful and massively self-indulgent about Early casting himself in the part of a woman with an eating disorder, especially when all the other parts played by women feel like their character description in the script is “psycho” or some variant thereof.  Are we just going to ignore that eating disorders are much higher in women than men, or that they’re rising globally? Is it all really being reduced to Early performing a sight gag repeat of the somewhat famous image of Kate turning round with cake smeared across her face? People, what are we doing here?

There’s a gutlessness about the whole thing. Early apes an art form that has few enough defenders and much of which is bordering on lost media. Why not spoof modern Lifetime movies, or go all-in on food influencer culture? Instead, he just throws a soft filter on a project that’s both lightweight and cruel, and he thinks that’s enough.

If Early thought he was making something with the transgressive vigor of early John Waters or Todd Haynes’ merciless and clearly influential Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, he’s shockingly wrong. Instead of his seeming intention to create something that’s both funny and yet very demure, very mindful, he’s churned out a barely-congealed dish that’s the thinnest of gruel.

Read James Scott’s interview with John Early.

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This article appears in July 3 • 2026.