STEEMPOP // Santa Clarita Diet is the Show About Yuppie Zombies That I Can’t Live Without

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The "first world problems" reality about Netflix is that it overwhelms you - outright bombards you, even - with new shows and movies. Compounding this, man do they tend to not promote shit except for the occasional auto-play trailer built into the top of the app, which is as annoying as it is informative about future media for their lineup. This is how nearly a year ago I almost missed the titular show, Santa Clarita Diet, and I honestly don't know how I could even be living my life right now if this had happened.

The crash course on SCD is that it revolves around Joel and Sheila Hammond (played by Timothy Olyphant and Drew Barrymore) who are a married pair of realtors living a thoroughly white-bread life with their rebellious daughter Abby (Liv Hewson) in an almost thoroughly white-bread town. Then one day Sheila starts violently throwing up all over one of their showings, dies, and immediately revives, this time with a taste for human flesh. Obviously, hijinks ensue.

And my god, the hijinks are plentiful and addictively hilarious, to the point where as soon as I was done binging the first season of SCD I rewatched the whole thing again within a week. The beauty of said hijinks was through the characters and personalities oh pretty much all involved. Through all of the Hammonds, we got this unbelievably energetic stream of exasperation off of everyone as the situation got equal parts freakier and gorier. What the introductory season of Santa Clarita Diet was able to accomplish was to somehow make a family of the most painfully milquetoast people on the planet and make it enjoyable to see them put in outrageous scenarios like buying a storage space to store dead bodies in for Sheila to store future meals or start hunting down Serbian lore about the weird lump she threw up before turning to a life of wolfing down assholes in her path like she was at a buffet. And now, amazingly, the second season has come along in the past couple weeks and exponentially increased upon all of its shenanigans.

Again, what holds the show together are the actors and how they are handling themselves. This show could easily just be the hokiest pile of garbage this side of a Hallmark movie festival, but the way Olyphant and Barrymore and company handle themselves is fantastic. This especially applies to Olyphant, who somehow transitioned from master of stoicism in Justified to king of comedic timing between these shows. I mean, he has always shown a Jon Hamm-ish penchant for presenting an aloof smirk and selling a comedic beat beyond their stupidly handsome demeanor before, so I'm not entirely shocked, but probably half the best laughs this show presents come through him standing there with this hands reverse akimbo (because I can't think of/Google search properly for a better term of him having his hands outward almost "jazzing" it) and the nearly defeated-looking slack in his shoulders and just looking like he's on the verge of packing everything up and moving three states over when something insane happens. But, because he is the most patient and loving of husbands, he sticks through thick and thin and wall-splattering dismemberment as his wife has her hiccups with her zombified status.

Also aiding this show to be the blast it is are two essential things, those being that there is pretty interesting lore being developed within the chaos of the show and it has an excellent supporting cast. Joel and Sheila's daughter, Abby, is the perfect amount of "older than her age smartass" for the show and its ridiculous circumstances. And the character actors in the background add all the right flavors to the runny raw meat of the show. There's plenty of nosy, over and undersexed yuppies that constantly threaten to discover a stray body or something they shouldn't. You've got actors like Andy Richter playing an overbearing and obnoxious head of the Realtor Agency the Hammonds work for always one condescending remark away from being a snack for Sheila, Nathan Fillion plays the philandering former realtor peer now turned sentient head after becoming Sheila's first snack in the first season, and script-writing phenom Thomas Lennon as a momma's boy Principle all just as the tip of the talent iceberg, in addition to cameos galore. Skyler Gisondo even plays a stereotypical know-it-all neighbor kid who is way too smart for his own good and there for an obviously painful "will-they-or-won't-they" potential relationship with Abby and nails it both as an exposition machine for the weird and growing weirder backstory to Sheila's zombieism and being endearing despite his smarminess.

Lastly, there's that story I've been talking about which, even though it's really not much of the actual thrust of the show which rightfully spends most its energy putting Joel and Sheila in ridiculous situations with ridiculous people (and, y'know, Nazis) but there's some freaky lore building in between the outrageous bits. It's started with tracing down Sheila's weird lump thing last season to Serbian folklore, and now it's being expounded upon in an even odder way that I don't want to spoil even if they aren't the actual focus of the show (yet). Plus the show is actually building a tight little circle of tenseness around the Hammonds as the neighbors (including a couple of the local police) are occasionally given just a little bit of a nudge toward stumbling upon Sheila's new cannibalistic ways, so all the funny bits have just that little bit of seriousness that permeates some genuine drama into foundation of the show. So essentially, this show just has it all and I am so in love with it that even though I have a literal week's worth of shows, hours wise, to watch with the likes of shows such as Bosch, Westworld, and Legion all returning this month alone, I'm one impulse button press away from redoing this fantastic and regretfully brief second season of Santa Clarita Diet. The first season out of the show put it somewhere in the "is this a guilty pleasure?" range for me given how odd and cheesy it was but now with the upped stakes and cemented as excellent performances by the cast, I just now consider it one of the best and most fun things I'm watching out of the plethora of quality TV I regularly consume. The only thing Santa Clarita Diet is now guilty of is being something I'm antsy waiting to come around again in another year.

-Humphrey Lee
Twitter: @HumphreyLee

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