Should You Get On The Santa Clarita Diet?

What Is This Thing?

Sheila and Joel have a nice life -- tidy house, only moderately sassy teenaged daughter, a nice living as a realtor team. Then Sheila becomes a zombie and things aren't so great anymore.

When Is It On?

Whenever you like, after it drops on Netflix Friday, February 3.

Why Was It Made Now?

I would have thought by now we would have hit the sub-basement of the public's interest in zombie-themed pop cultural product. Evidently, that is not the case.

What's Its Pedigree?

The series was created by Victor Fresco, formerly the mind behind Andy Richter Controls The Universe and Better Off Ted, and stars Drew Barrymore -- in her first TV series role -- as Sheila, the zombie around whom the action swirls. Timothy Olyphant (Justified, my filthiest dreams) plays Joel. The supporting cast is packed with faces you know: Richter as Joel and Sheila's boss; Mary Elizabeth Ellis (The Grinder) and Ricardo Chavira (currently recurring on Jane The Virgin) as their next-door neighbours; and Nathan Fillion (Castle) as a new realtor at our protagonists' agency, trying to snake them out of one big listing they haven't been able to move.

...And?

Spoiler warning or no, I am going to be as opaque about this as possible: something happens pretty early on in the pilot that belongs in the Comedy Gross-Out Hall Of Fame. It's shocking, and then it goes on long enough to stop being funny and come back around. I realize it's ridiculous to say about a sitcom in which a woman becomes a zombie, but tries to hide it and go on without letting her condition disrupt her life, but it's such an audaciously disgusting event that, regardless of whether you can look directly at it, you have to admire that the show would put a sequence so bold and potentially alienating so early in the run of the series. I laughed a lot, but it will be polarizing.

The smartest thing the show does is let a relatively large number of people -- three, but still -- in on Sheila's situation. Of course it builds suspense to a have a character keeping a secret, but when more than half of every episode is about misdirection or subterfuge or slapstick in the name of concealment, they all start to feel samey. (Younger, I love you, but come on.) Instead, Joel and Sheila tell their daughter Abby (Liv Hewson) what's going on, and she quickly engages their son's next-door neighbour Eric -- a scholar of the zombie genre -- in trying to figure out a possible cure. If not for Joel and Abby being in the cone of silence together, we couldn't get the adorable moment a few episodes in, when they end up miles from any other person in a park shelter and scream their horror and confusion at each other. It lets there be a little more to the world of the show than just preserving Sheila from exposure -- they can freak out about how weird and scary it is that the female head of their household now eats raw meat. Among other things.

...But?

I watched the first four, in which the pace is very strange. The series premiere packs in a Scandal's worth of shocking plot developments, but after that it slows way down, like it can't decide whether it wants to keep goosing the viewer with gross-out gags or, instead, portray the "reality" of an undead person...un-living in normal society.

Barrymore is also a problem in a multicam sitcom setting like this. I've liked a lot of her work over the years, but even after the many comedies she's headlined, she's never quit learned how to play a comic scene without faintly smiling.

That's her after getting screamed at by her boss in front of a new colleague. It's distracting.

Then there's Olyphant -- who I love, but who seems miscast as Sheila's fairly meek husband. The first thing that happens as the show begins is that he gets turned down for sex, which: no. We then find out that he's holding a grudge against the toaster oven they've just purchased. "Did you ever send them an email?" Sheila asks. Joel mopes that he decided not to after rereading it: "It came off a little crazy." I get that actors are capable of playing characters other than the ones for which they're best known, but as Joel, Olyphant seems like basically himself -- the talk show guest version, anyway -- doing a vague impression of what he thinks a wimpy husband might be like, having never met one.

And then there's the gore, which is, I would say, about 2% less gory than what you might see on The Walking Dead and in no way lightened for the comedic context as on, for instance, iZombie.

We see a lot of what led up to that tableau, too. If you're squeamish about violence and gore but the peppy trailer made you think that, at last, someone made a zombie show for you, be warned: they did not.

...So?

After watching the first four, in which there starts to be an inkling about how this affliction may have struck Sheila, I'm curious to know where the story's going to go, and no, I don't just mean whether we'll see more of Joel's butt than FX permitted us with Raylan. But honestly, you're going to do within the first eight minutes whether you can stomach watching this show's gooshier effects, because they are INTENSELY DISGUSTING. If you can hang: this might be for you!