Santa Clarita Diet
SPOILER ALERT! The actual Santa Clarita Diet is human flesh! That's right, this is a zombie show. A comedy-horror, mostly life-like zombie show.
I didn't know that going in, but it didn't bother me at all. I don't watch zombie shows, but this one is worth it.
Santa Clarita Diet stars Drew Barrymore, who I actually haven't seen in anything in years, and Timothy Olyphant, who I can't remember seeing in anything in particular, as a married pair of Realtors (or "Real-a-tors"), Sheila and Joel Hammond, raising a teenage daughter in quiet suburban Santa Clarita. While showing a house, Sheila suddenly gets ill, comedically throwing up -- as in "insane amount of vomit". Joel, at first, thinks she's dead, but she comes around. Fact is, she is dead. Or undead, as the case may be.
Sheila discovers that she now prefers raw meat to cooked meat, and all is fine until another agent, Gary, wonderfully played by Nathan Fillion provokes the Hammonds. Instinct kicks in and Sheila pounces on Gary, killing him. (Don't worry, Fillion manages to make more appearances in the series.) Once Sheila has taken human flesh, there's no going back to raw chicken or ground beef.
So the question becomes how to have a normal-ish family life while being able to find people who deserve to die and be eaten, while avoiding the police, who happen to live on either side of them.
Barrymore is great in the part, as she moves on to "Mom" roles. Olyphant is good, quirky and somewhat funny, but sometimes the writing for his character is a little off, like they haven't figured him out yet. Or maybe his character is just that neurotic that he's supposed to be like that -- I mean, his wife did become a zombie, after all.
Also of note are the cop neighbor's wife and his partner, played by Mary Elizabeth Ellis and Natalie Morales, respectively. Seeing the two of them together was fun, and a little confusing, because I kept thinking about the two of them being from The Grinder, where they played Rob Lowe's character's sister-in-law and coworker, respectively. But here they're just a couple of neighbors.
Season two gets more into how this zombie disease was started and if they can prevent a zombie apocalypse from happening, all while staying out of jail or mental institutions, and it stays funny without getting blogged down in the plot.
Recommended binging, even if you're not a fan of zombies.
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