100 Favorite Shows: #78 — Santa Clarita Diet
“Why can’t we ever have one easy fucking day?”
If one had to guess what Drew Barrymore’s first regular television role would be and what Timothy Olyphant’s follow-up to pantheon western prestige series would be, no one would have guessed it would be a horror-comedy about a woman who turns into a zombie. And yet, that’s the magic of the New Golden Age of Television: anything goes. Santa Clarita Diet (created by Better Off Ted’s Victor Fresco) begins with Sheila (Barrymore) and Joel (Olyphant) Hammond as humble Californian real estate agents who are tasked with maintaining normalcy the best they can when Sheila transforms into an undead zombie. Surprising, but always delightful, gaffes of gore followed from Sheila’s kills over the course of Santa Clarita Diet’s three seasons, which stretched from 2017 to 2019 on Netflix.
(You’re definitely going to find some gruesome Santa Clarita Diet details in this essay, in case that’s something you’d rather avoid.)
“Prior to this, you led a mindlessly happy suburban existence which left you fundamentally unprepared for the life and death decisions that now plague your every waking moment.” This is what Abby (Liv Hewson) tells her father, Joel, when he rolls his eyes at his daughter’s consternation, thinking she hates him only because she’s a teenager. (She mostly hates living with zombies.) “Jesus,” he replies, a bit wary of how apt Abby’s comprehensive takedown of his and Sheila’s identity was. “Don’t listen to her,” Sheila remarks, hustling through the kitchen. It’s a microcosmic moment on Santa Clarita Diet, which depicts Abby as more insightful than others expect her to be, Joel as a man still adjusting to his new zombie-fied way of life, and Sheila as a woman who has completely adapted altogether.
She’s not wrong, though. Joel is the kind of character that some war veterans would scoff at because they find violence to be a one-track path to masculinity. This comes opposed to Joel, who is less traditional and more reserved and contemplative in his identity. When, in season one’s “Attention to Detail,” Sheila is tasked with killing a sex trafficker as a result of neighbor Dan’s (Ricardo Chavira) blackmail, Joel is left with the task of retrieving an incriminating pen from a previous crime scene. And picking up toilet paper from Rite Aid on the way home.
For most shows, picking up a pen and toilet paper would be the ideal task, as opposed to murder and cannibalism. For Joel, though, it’s depicted as a slight against his own conception of manhood. Sheila engages in terrifying, potentially life-ending behavior while he maintains the duties of a normally functioning household.
He’s also struggling with the idea that his wife is a member of the undead population at all. Leila Cohan-Miccio’s hilarious script points to many of these exasperated, restrained moments from Joel as he forces a smile through his unending frustration and always-in-motion reconciliations. (Ed (Gerald McRaney) delights in his banal acquisition of honey and Joel, harboring more serious concerns at the moment, retorts, “Honey? Jesus Christ, Ed. That’s such fucking good news!” Later, Sheila brings finger food (literally human fingers in a Ziploc bag as a snack) to her criminal stakeout and Joel’s eyes narrow with a “That’s fun.”) Coupling this with the barrage of antiquated, emasculating insults from the supposedly “real” men in his orbit, Joel finally snaps at the end of the installment, caving in Dan’s head with a shovel.
It catapults Joel into a stronger sense of his role in the zombie family’s new life of debauchery, but he never quite stops his own bewilderment at the rapidity with which Sheila grew accustomed to a grotesque lifestyle. Ultimately, Joel just seems to be content not vomiting in revulsion as much as she did initially in the series premiere, “So Then a Bat or a Monkey.”
As Joel comes into his own (with an unbelievably fantastic Olyphant playing against the ruthless type of his Deadwood and Justified heroes), he begins to understand his relationship with Sheila in a new way. Her turning into the undead isn’t quite an allegory for a marriage growing distant over time, but it does call into question how far Joel is willing to go to love and support his wife (even if this is way further than any reasonable human should be expected to accept). Due to this, Sheila is forced to become more understanding, more patient, and more in control of her newfound bloodlust so as not to murder the people she loves.
She’s also played to perfection by Drew Barrymore, in a role that could’ve been anyone’s, but was made her own by the levels of Barrymore “cuteness” brought into the series. If Olyphant was playing against type, Barrymore was leaning into her past character creations of cuteness by depicting that same behavior in tandem with someone who was also using tendons for spaghetti and fingers for hold-overs. The juxtaposition of the audience’s preconceptions of Barrymore with the surprisingly intense gore and violence on the series was dialed up delightfully throughout the series, to the point where I found myself getting desensitized to the gore.
On top of that, the dynamic between the kids, Abby and her friend, Eric (Skyler Gisondo), was similar to that of Sheila and Joel, where the former was more in tune with the machinations of blood and guts while the latter took some time to develop the stomach for it. (The stories saved for Abby and Eric are also as equally entertaining as those reserved for Sheila and Joel. Hewson and Gisondo delivered their lines just as delightfully as their adult counterparts. For example, Abby pulled away from Eric’s kiss attempt, “horrified,” and Eric would be “unbearable” if he sampled his father’s cocaine stash.) Typically, I’m not a fan of gore and I struggled right alongside Joel in the series’ outset. But over time, I actually found myself not entirely minding it? Shocking, I know.
Maybe my brain just finally matured enough to understand that Drew Barrymore, an icon of films I love (50 First Dates gang, rise up!), was not an actual zombie and the blood came from the prop department. However, the light tone of the series also worked to put me at ease to the point where I could binge watch multiple episodes in a sitting.
With creative body mutilations and casual toss-outs of the C-word, Santa Clarita Diet was uniformly R-rated, but it never felt like it. The music was lilting, the characters were lovable, the setting was suburban. Even the title promised something along the lines of an accessible morning infomercial hosted by Valerie Bertinelli or Joanna Garcia-Swisher. But the depth of depravity in the series was visceral because the show paralleled Sheila, who lost the part of her brain capable of developing inhibitions and apprehensions. When Sheila vomited her infectious agent of toxicity (cutely named Mr. Ball-Legs), it thrust her and her family into an unthinkable world. Fortunately, they didn’t react the way many characters do on television and succumb to the horrors (like Walter White going far beyond “all in” on the drug trade). Instead, they tried to operate as morally as zombies possibly could. Eating only villains and racists, sex traffickers and Nazis. Because of their morality, though, the fact that the people Sheila ate were human trash did not make it any easier for the others to accept that they were complicit in an undead sort of vigilante justice.
These sentiments were best exemplified in season two’s “The Queen of England” when Abby approached her parents and dryly teased, “Something happened yesterday you might wanna know about. What was it? Oh, yeah! I met another undead person.” By this point, Joel and Sheila can’t keep their victims straight and they misattribute the subject of Abby’s crisis with a reference to Gary’s (Nathan Fillion as an exemplar of Diet’s parade of character actors, including the aforementioned Carlos from Desperate Housewives, Zachary Knighton, Ethan Suplee, Mary Elizabeth Ellis, Joel McHale, Maggie Lawson) decapitated head in their cellar. This prompts Abby to ask just one question: “What the fuck?”
Throughout the series, she is torn between mortification over her parents’ actions and the intense desire to team up with them and aid their quests. Her pleas to be included are often met with subtle reminders of the shattered suburbia (they turn her down and offer her chocolate milk with her lunch as a special treat). These types of jokes — counterbalancing the Zombieland-esque action with the model of the nuclear family — were often repeated throughout Santa Clarita Diet, but they were damn funny ones every time.
Fresco’s horror show did have greater narrative aspirations beyond just being surprisingly funny every spring. For one, it was gravely intrigued by the nuances of a marriage aging to the point where their child is nearly ready for university. When Joel and Sheila split up in “Attention to Detail,” it’s initially for the purpose of preventing their own incrimination, but they soon realize that they’re a partnership not meant to be split up in their hunts. Just like a harmonious marriage, killing and eating people is not a business meant to be conducted alone.
Eventually, Diet does propose the everyone’s-thinking-it idea of Sheila turning Joel into a zombie, too, allowing them to live eternally with one another. However, he’s understandably resistant to the notion. Due to her loss of inhibition, she’s become the person she “always wanted to be,” feeling free of care for others besides those who matter most and living freely by her own convictions. But she’s also lost the ability to understand that the zombie lifestyle is not necessarily desirable by all. Joel mostly wants to focus on appreciating what they have (a value instilled by Ramona (Ramona Young) seeking her “own Joel” and leaving a key under the mat… of her neighbor), but Sheila sees the potential for more. It’s hard to compromise on immortality, but Joel’s steady progression towards being an active member of his own plight brings him to the point of giving in to Sheila’s infliction — even if it was partially borne out of life-saving necessity.
In addition to this evaluation of long-term love, Fresco ensured that Santa Clarita Diet was also a veritable zombie series for those who were more in sync with the horror elements of the show over the comedy. It split this focus on a greater lore of zombies (the plot lines of cults and the Knights of Serbia deepening the way their world reacted to zombies) and on a sense of logic for how zombies worked slightly differently in Sheila and Joel’s world (Sheila is not brainless, does not consume any flesh in her path, and even has the ability to deduce that a meal of clams from Japopo’s sent her on the journey to undead status).
The heels were clipped before they ever had the chance to flesh out the impressive world-building that the end of season three promised, but Fresco still seemed aware enough of Netflix’s “three-season curse” to orchestrate a fitting ending for the series in case of cancellation. (There is a cliff-hanger, but it’s still pretty intuitive.) I can’t be too mad at Netflix. With plot-heavy cliffhangers and easy-to-be-around characters, Santa Clarita Diet was perfectly designed for the streaming binge. And even though we didn’t explore the plot machinations in too much depth, it was still a quaint batch of thirty episodes that brought us laughs, a delightful marriage between Drew Barrymore and Timothy Olyphant, and some of the most shocking organ destructions of any series — comedy or not. In a series about people who rebuke the permanence of the middle class and the finality of death, I suppose it was special enough to have a resolution at all. Even if more were destined for a tango with Mr. Ball-Legs. Long live (or, unlive) Mr. Ball-Legs.
