Netflix has spent the past decade building a reputation for shows that sound like a bad pitch and somehow work anyway. Santa Clarita Diet is one of the purest examples of that house style: a suburban marriage comedy about a woman who turns into a zombie, created by Victor Fresco and carried by Drew Barrymore and Timothy Olyphant. It ran for three seasons and 30 episodes, premiered on February 3, 2017, and ended on March 29, 2019. It never got the audience it deserved, and it never quite solved the problem at its own center.
Trailer, via Netflix.
Sheila Hammond Eats the Neighbors
The premise is stated plainly and then followed honestly. Joel and Sheila Hammond are everyday real estate agents in Santa Clarita, California. Their lives are normal and mundane until Sheila shows symptoms of having become a zombie. The show does not treat this as a metaphor that stays politely in the background. Sheila craves human flesh. Her personality turns primal and impulsive. The bewildered family seeks a cure while dealing with the consequences, and the consequences are mostly bodies.
Barrymore plays Sheila as a woman who has been freed rather than cursed. That is the smartest decision the series makes.
Before the change, Sheila is agreeable, apologetic and a little bit dead already. After it, she is direct, hungry and alive in a way that frightens her husband more than the cannibalism does.
Olyphant is the anchor. Joel is the one who has to dispose of what his wife leaves behind, and Olyphant plays him as a fundamentally decent man doing increasingly indecent things with a realtor’s calm. The pairing works because neither actor reaches for the joke. They play the marriage straight, and the horror-comedy comes out of the gap between what they are saying and what is in the garage.
Abby and Eric Carry the Second Half
Liv Hewson plays Abby Hammond, the daughter, and Skyler Gisondo plays Eric Bemis, the neighbor kid who becomes her partner in covering up the family’s crimes. The teen storyline is where the show quietly does its best work. Abby is not a sidekick. She is a kid whose mother became a zombie, and Hewson plays the anger underneath the competence.
The series is a single-camera comedy, and it looks like one. Bright California light, wide suburban streets, an ordinary house where something unspeakable is happening in the laundry room. The visual joke is that nothing looks like a horror show. The genre labels — comedy, mystery, crime — all apply, and the mystery thread, the question of what actually happened to Sheila and whether there is a cure, gives the seasons a spine.
The Cure Keeps Not Arriving
Here is the structural problem, and it is worth naming. The show sets up a cure as its engine, then spends three seasons not finding one. That is a legitimate choice for a comedy that wants to stay a comedy, but it means the plot has to keep escalating to stay interesting, and escalation in a show about eating people has a ceiling.
The mythology gets thicker. The body count gets higher. The show keeps introducing new complications instead of resolving the one it started with. By the third season, the family has built an entire life around managing Sheila’s condition, and the show has less to say about it than it did in the first ten episodes.
The series centers on husband and wife real estate team Joel and Sheila Hammond whose normal, mundane lives change dramatically when Sheila shows symptoms of having become a zombie.
That is the whole engine, and it is a good one. The trouble is that the show never decides whether it wants to end. Netflix canceled it on April 26, 2019, after the third season premiered on March 29, 2019, and the cancellation landed as a genuine loss rather than a mercy. That is a compliment, but it is also a diagnosis. A show that cannot conclude is a show that has been running in place.
What Actually Works
The marriage. That is the answer. The best episodes of Santa Clarita Diet are not the ones with the most gore or the deepest mythology. They are the ones where Joel and Sheila have to be a couple — negotiating, lying to each other, deciding together what they are willing to do. The show understands that a marriage is a conspiracy, and it makes the conspiracy literal.
Fresco serves as showrunner and executive producer alongside Barrymore, Olyphant, Aaron Kaplan, Tracy Katsky, Chris Miller, Ember Truesdell and Ruben Fleischer. That is a lot of hands, and the show occasionally shows it. The tone wobbles between seasons. The first season, ten episodes, is the tightest. The second premiered on March 23, 2018, after Netflix renewed the series on March 29, 2017. The third got a ten-episode order on May 8, 2018.
The supporting cast does what it can with roles that are mostly functions. Neighbors, coworkers, cops. The show is not interested in them, and it shows.
Where It Lands
Three seasons is the right length for this idea and also the wrong one. The show needed either one more season to land the ending or one fewer to avoid the drift. It got neither.
Here is how the show’s ambitions hold up against what it actually delivers:
- A marriage comedy — it succeeds, mostly on the strength of Barrymore and Olyphant.
- A horror show — it succeeds at the gross-out, fails at the dread. Nothing here is actually scary.
- A mystery — it fails. The cure never comes, and the mythology never pays off.
- A teen coming-of-age story — it succeeds better than it has any right to, thanks to Hewson and Gisondo.
- A satire of suburban real estate — this is the one thread the show never really pulls, and that is a waste of a good setting.
Santa Clarita Diet is a show with a great central performance, a great central pairing, and no idea how to stop. It is funny, it is warm, and it is structurally stuck. The first season is worth your time on its own. The rest is a long, pleasant, increasingly aimless wait for something the show was never going to deliver.
The published critical score is 6.7 out of 10, and that feels right. Not a failure, not a classic. A good show that never became the great one its cast was capable of carrying.
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