Sometimes, a TV show will struggle under the weight of expectation. The first series of True Detective, for example, inspired so many frothing superlatives that the follow-up could only ever disappoint. New Netflix series Santa Clarita Diet is another case at hand.
It’s only just arrived on Netflix, but people in the know have been telling me for weeks just how bad this series is. “I couldn’t finish the first episode,” one said. “Worst show of the year, guaranteed” said another. So when I sat down to watch it, I was braced for agony. After all, it’s a comedy where Drew Barrymore plays a cannibal. What could possibly be worse than that?
Turns out, quite a lot. Surprisingly, and I say this with some caution, Santa Clarita Diet isn’t bad.
I mean, it isn’t great either. It’s a heavily stylised single-camera comedy that plays like a remake of Desperate Housewives that’s been translated into Chinese and back several times over. The cast mugs and yelps like it’s collectively being poisoned. It’s gory and putrid and, as a metaphor for suburban monotony, couldn’t be any more heavyhanded if Banksy had spraypainted it on the side of a Snappy Snaps. The first episode is especially weak; so try-hard and tonally unsure that you’d be forgiven for bailing out before anyone even gets eaten.
But it does improve. Santa Clarita Diet follows a married couple (Drew Barrymore and Timothy Olyphant) whose lives are transformed when Barrymore is turned into an undead cannibal. The show follows their attempts to figure out the logistics of sourcing a constant supply of human flesh, while simultaneously searching for a cure and raising their child. It’s like Dexter, basically, if Dexter was silly on purpose.
Because, make no mistake, this is a very silly show indeed. There are episodes where, to stave off a police investigation, Drew Barrymore has to Man v Food an entire human corpse over the course of an evening. There are moments where she coughs up furballs of bodily hair. There are farting cadavers, and more vomit than I have ever seen on television. It’s so broad, and so deliberately stupid, that you can understand why it isn’t for everyone.
Worryingly, though, it might be for me. Santa Clarita Diet was created by Victor Fresco, the man responsible for Andy Richter Controls the Universe, one of the most incorrectly-cancelled programmes of all time, and this show shares some of that show’s absurdist DNA. This is never more so the case than with Olyphant’s character Joel. Joel’s entire personality transforms from scene to scene – one minute he’s horny, then empathetic, then smart, then the dumbest TV dad in a medium already stacked to the gills with dumb TV dads – but this inconsistency seems to work. Olyphant absolutely boots the role into the rafters and, once I became attuned to his weird frequencies, I actually found myself hoping he’d be onscreen more.
Now, listen. I might be wrong here. For all I know, you might side with my colleagues. It’s still possible that Santa Clarita Diet will go down as one of Netflix’s biggest failures.
But something about it appealed to me. The nonsense premise, the overcooked acting, the concussed story beats, the way that – like Search Party before it – it relentlessly drives forward from episode to episode. I wasn’t planning to say this, but it tickled me. So let me puncture your expectations. Santa Clarita Diet is no masterpiece, but it’s far from the worst TV show of the year. That’s still Taboo.
View all comments >