Zombie dearest: Feast on ‘Santa Clarita Diet’
Drew Barrymore has a way of sounding convincingly phony that makes her perfect for satire, especially, it turns out, if she’s satirizing a suburban real estate agent with dietary challenges.
Barrymore co-stars with Timothy Olyphant (“Justified”) in the new dark comedy “Santa Clarita Diet,” whose 13-episode first season is now available on Netflix.
The show’s title may suggest that it focuses on some trendy weight loss plan, and in a way, maybe it does. A smarmy real estate agent named Gary loses a lot of weight in the first episode, beginning with a few of his fingers, which Sheila (Barrymore) bites off like celery stalks at a suburban potluck. Talk about finger food. Sheila, you see, is a zombie. Not the whole stomping around, rotting flesh, “Walking Dead” kind of zombie, but rather, a well-dressed mom who drives an SUV, is into power walks, raises her delightfully cynical teenage daughter, Abby (Liv Hewson, “Dramaworld”), and works with husband Joel (Olyphant) selling suburban houses with beige-based color schemes.
Sheila is very much the zombie next door, facing all the challenges of balancing home life and work life, with one extra challenge: keeping the freezer well-stocked with dead bodies, because for Sheila, anything but human flesh is zombie treif.
It takes Joel and Sheila a while to figure out how to keep Mommy fed without having to kill too many humans, but at least they have good intentions: They only kill terrible people. And they come up with the idea to stock the freezer with “frozen dinners” after they learn from their mistakes with Sheila’s first kill: “I feel so bad that I wasted so much of Gary,” she laments.
She obviously has to learn to control her hunger. As she and Joel chat with a neighbor while he’s watering his herb garden, Joel has to restrain her from acting on her drive.
“He’s knee-deep in his herb gardening,” she says with unassailable logic. “He’s seasoning himself.”
Meanwhile, Abby, who’s discovered Mom’s secret, is consoled by classmate and next door neighbor Eric (Skyler Gisando, “Once Upon a Time”). Of course he has a crush on her, but Abby doesn’t have time for that, given the stress of having a zombie for a mom. She starts ditching school and is threatened with expulsion. Sheila tries valiantly to keep her priorities in order and deal with Abby’s issues.
“I know we have to kill somebody today, but we have to be parents every day,” she says.
The series was created and written by Victor Fresco, who’s been around long enough to learn his craft working on traditional shows like “Mad About You,” but has shown an admirable, if not always successful, drive to push the sitcom envelope with shows like “Better Off Ted,” the flop “Sean Saves the World,” “Go On” and “My Name Is Earl,” working in various capacities.
Like Jenji Kohan’s “Weeds” for Showtime, “Santa Clarita” works by setting an absurd story in soullessly wellordered suburbia. The scripts are solid, and the performances are spot on, especially the two leads.
The only real question is whether the show can sustain itself beyond a first season.
On the plus side, these characters are nicely nuanced, but the whole zombie thing is more challenging to sustain in a comedy than in a drama like “The Walking Dead.”
In the long run, you have to ask how much audiences will be able to digest.
Bone appetit.