Santa Clarita Diet Deserved a Few More Courses

[TMC]

https://25yearslatersite.com/2020/02...-more-courses/

Santa Clarita Diet is the most wholesome show about serial murder that you’re ever going to watch, and it was taken from us far too soon. Victor Fresco’s dark comedy focuses on the Hammond family: husband-and-wife realtor team Sheila (Drew Barrymore) and Joel (Timothy Olyphant), and their daughter Abby (Liv Hewson). At the outset, the biggest problem in Joel’s home life is that the toaster oven’s knobs don’t have the right amount of slack. Sheila’s a little too timid, and she knows it, but they still make a great realtor team (or, as they pronounce it, “real-a-tor”). There’s not much more they could ask for, but there’s something vaguely monotonous about their suburban living.

It’s a pretty standard setup for a half-hour sitcom, until Sheila begins to projectile vomit uncontrollably and dies, only to quickly reawaken without a pulse, with a fresh appetite for human meat and a much stronger id. She still looks exactly herself, though, so she and Joel go about their lives with a new wrinkle: not only do they have to keep Sheila’s secret from the rest of the world, they also need to figure out how to keep her fed. Fresco chose for the couple to be realtors because realtors have an element of “forced friendliness,” a learned behavior that helps the Hammonds maintain Sheila’s facade.

That facade wouldn’t work if Barrymore and Olyphant’s chemistry and comedic timing weren’t master-class, but they are. Joel is a treasure trove of gif-worthy reactions, as his combination of constant incredulity and deadpan reactions play magnificently off of Sheila’s matter-of-fact approach to murder, which never gets old. The situation has a similar tempo to more generic sitcoms, such as someone’s in-laws moving into the house and creating a high-stress environment for the marriage, except in this case the wife has an insatiable appetite for fresh human flesh.

As the cycle of killing bad people, cleaning up, freezing the remains, and looking for answers to Sheila’s zombification goes on, Joel and Sheila generally follow the same pattern: they attempt to act normal to dispel suspicion; they act so abnormally that suspicion increases; and the situation somehow resolves itself but eventually morphs into something more serious.