I didn’t even know that Drew Barrymore (“Never Been Kissed,” “The Wedding Singer”) was still active in Hollywood. I haven’t really seen anything of hers be successful, or good, in years. I enjoyed her movie “Never Been Kissed” because she was relatable as Josie. But then, one quiet night in my apartment, I noticed Barrymore was in this new Netflix original, “Santa Clarita Diet,” and I didn’t have anything else better to do.
Five hours and every episode later, I went to bed. Although unimpressed, I might watch season two because I have this pet peeve about being left on a cliffhanger.
Barrymore and Timothy Olyphant (“Justified”) star as a real estate team/high school sweethearts couple, Sheila and Joel Hammond, living in Santa Clarita, California with their overly-sarcastic teenage daughter, Abby (Liv Hewson). Their idyllic, monotonous lifestyle gets shaken up when Sheila mysteriously becomes undead.
Instead of filet mignon, Sheila indulges on brains and flesh. And everyone gets to consume another supernatural-themed show. Good thing it’s a comedy; that always makes things better.
The rest of season one follows the Hammonds as they maintain appearances for their neighbors while murdering people so Sheila doesn’t become ravenous. They recruit their nerdy teenage neighbor Eric (Skyler Gisondo), who’s stereotypically and obviously in love with Abby, to help find a cure for Sheila’s undead condition.
Creator Victor Fresco could have made an example of the affluent, “Santa Clarita” lifestyle through clever satire and intellectual jokes. Instead, he reduced “Santa Clarita Diet” into a string of predictable gags. I wanted to see how this comfortable suburban family handles real issues that go deeper than Trader Joe’s running out of brie or forgetting to pick up the dry cleaning. All I got was a few sex and barf jokes to muster laughs throughout 10 episodes.
“It was very new for me: I’ve not seen anything that’s like the tone of this show,” Victor Fresco said in an interview with NME. “I’ve watched ‘The Walking Dead’, ‘Dexter’, I think there was a tone of ‘Desperate Housewives’, this light, suburban tone – but I didn’t see anything that had horror-comedy tonally similar to this. Which I like, because as a writer you’re trying to come up with something you haven’t seen before.”
I’ll admit, I laughed a little bit in the beginning. The first two or three episodes gave me hope that Barrymore’s career wasn’t a redundant string of one-liners in shabby blockbuster comedies, and Olyphant showed he could actually be funny as a husband stuck in an impossible situation.
The idea was original and clever, but it fell flat like Fresco’s previous works have, including “Better Off Ted,” a short-lived comedy he produced or “My Name is Earl” and its impressive four-year run of redneck jokes. Reviewer Matt Zoller Seitz shared my opinion about the potential “Santa Clarita Diet” had for a deeper plotline that’s oozing with social-commentary, irony and symbolism for larger issues, such as capitalistic hunger.
“Once we learn that Sheila has a mysterious curse-like condition that renders her, um, dead, and craving human flesh, Santa Clarita Diet becomes an exceptionally gruesome and sardonic comedy about marriage and parenting with overtones of an addiction narrative,” Seitz wrote in a review of “Santa Clarita Diet” for Vulture.
If the bad jokes weren’t enough, the gruesome nature of the show turned many viewers away. I don’t know what grossed me out more: Sheila and Joel sharing the weight of a cooler filled with human body parts and bloody seeping out or Joel popping Sheila’s eye back into its socket. Luckily for me, I have a strong stomach. University of the Cumberlands student Ashton Rector only watched the first episode because she couldn’t handle the massive amounts of gore.
“If there would have been some redeeming quality within the show, then I might have been more apt to continue watching,” Rector said. “Overall, it made me nauseous, from Drew Barrymore’s vomit and what I thought might be my own at the end.”
The balance was off. “Santa Clarita Diet” was either too much of a poor-quality comedy or too much of a zombie horror show. Next time, pull back a little bit Fresco and that show might last more than a few seasons.
Amanda Kelly 