Jamie on the Box – Santa Clarita Diet

TV Review: Santa Clarita Diet 

Netflix’s popular zomcom is back for its third season, and it’s bloody good

Years ago I worked with a lady in her early sixties, who told me that the secret to her long, stable and happy marriage had been variety, pacing and always having something to look forward to. She and her husband courted, they married, they got a house, they had kids, they moved, they grew, they became grandparents – the beats of their lives perfectly timed and arranged to minimise monotony and banish boredom whenever it threatened to rear its head.

Variety, pacing, something to look forward to. See? The secret to a successful marriage.

It’s also the secret to a successful TV show. The best ones keep moving – quickly, powerfully and with purpose – forking off at just the right times and in just the right directions to keep the journey rolling forwards and the scenery fresh. In gourmet terms: giving you just enough to fill your belly, but never enough to make you sick.

Two recent shows that have been exemplars of this pattern are the super-slick, high-concept comedies The Good Place, and Santa Clarita Diet. The former is due a welcome return later this year, while the latter dropped its third season on Netflix at the end of March: even zanier, funnier, and gorier than ever before. This time around there’s also a surprising amount of heart to proceedings, and I don’t just mean the kind that’s ripped from a victim’s chest and snacked upon by the ravenous undead.

The aftermath of Officer Anne’s desert-based pledge to serve as Sheila’s disciple (season two’s cliff-hanger) is dealt with in typical fast and funny fashion, paving the way for this season’s trio of real and credible dangers: the FBI, sniffing around Eric and Abby’s explosive political statement; the Knights of Serbia, an ancient order dedicated to the eradication of the undead, in town to ply their post-fatal trade; and Dobrivoje Poplovic, the Serbian colonel who wants to capture Santa Clarita’s ‘zombies’ and subject them to a fate worse than… well, undeath.

As always, Santa Clarita Diet deals zippily with its many perils and conundrums, putting them front-and-centre just long enough to wring the maximum amount of interesting and hilarious moments from them, but always wrapping them up and burning them off before they threaten to become humdrum.

This season’s enduring philosophical and ethical question centres on the morality of immortality, specifically if it’s ever right to pass zombiehood on to another person, even with their consent. As the season unfolds it’s clearer than ever before that the power of life over – and life after – death is a heavy burden to bear, for biter, bitten and bystanders all.

Good old Gary

Jonathan Slavin is brilliant as former mental-patient Ron – a maniacal, bug-eyed cross between Peter Capaldi and the Dean from Community – who dupes literal talking-head Gary into biting him, before going out proselytising in the name of zombiehood. Despite Joel and Sheila’s very active opposition to Ron’s reckless behaviour, Sheila has a crisis of conscience when she meets Jean, a prickly old lady with a terminal illness. Jean’s prickly because she won’t live long enough to see her first grandchild born. To bite or not to bite. That is the question… the question that Joel and Sheila have very different answers to.

And Joel finds himself under increasing pressure to join the ranks of the undead, so he and Sheila won’t find themselves separated by his inevitable natural death. Will they or won’t they renew their wedding vows to read ‘Til undeath do us part’?

Incidentally, having loved and admired Timothy Oliphant as seasoned tough guys in both Deadwood and Justified, it’s a joy to see how good he is at comedy. He’s pretty much done a reverse Brian Cranston.

One of the many brilliant things about Santa Clarita Diet is how the big questions about and dangers to Joel and Sheila’s marriage are dealt with as if they were the sort of minor irritations more typically encountered on tea-time soap operas. In Santa Clarita, as in real life, we absorb the horrors of our lives and shrink and tame them until they seem as ordinary to us as Uncle Frank farting at the Christmas dinner table. The very funny juxtaposition between the absolute, blood-splattering insanity of the undead life-style and Joel and Sheila’s sanitised, almost cliched existence in middle-class suburbia is made funnier still by the couple’s tendency to react to the misfortunes and people around them with the forced jollility and fixed smiles of a cutesy couple in a 1950s sitcom.

Laughs, gore, fun, shocks, head, heart, soul: Santa Clarita Diet’s third season has got the lot. Not to mention a healthy, hefty dollop of empowerment.

While representation in media is important, the recent glut of male-to-female character transformations on the big and little screens has felt less like a cultural revolution and more like an effort on the part of media financiers to adjust to the shifting demographics of cinema attendance and merchandise spending. In short, they’re going where the money is. And all the while radical feminists, right-on lefties, chauvinist assholes and slobbering incels battle each other beneath market capitalism’s steely glare…

Santa Clarita Diet proves that you can approach the whole subject of gender and representation without being gimmicky; without even making it obvious that’s what you’re doing. It’s quietly subversive; a highly polished, very funny, wildly entertaining show that just happens to have strong female characters at its helm. And not strong in a ‘look, I can bench-press a body-builder, and I know 6 kinds of karate’ sort of a way, but strong in a ‘we’re regular women surviving and keeping our family afloat in these unique and highly dangerous circumstances, and sometimes we fuck it up’ sort of a way.

Sheila and her daughter are the lynch-pins of the show: strong, flawed, fierce, funny, likeable women who drive the action forwards through a combination of their tenaciousness, kindness, curiosity, compassion, intelligence, impulsivity and thirst for activism. In contrast the men – while also very likeable, and occasionally heroic in their own bumbling way – are neurotic, over-cautious, angst-filled, and frantic. Joel and Eric evoke the Jay Pritchett and Phil Dunphy dynamic, except both of them are Phil Dunphy.

Toxic masculinity – whether it’s located in lecherous lotharios, serial abusers or actual Nazis – is always punished, and always fatally. It doesn’t get much more right-on than a recently empowered woman literally devouring the very worst the patriarchy has to offer. I look forward with great relish to see how the squeamish and squirrelly Joel reacts to joining the ranks of the post-living.

Here’s to the variety and exquisite pacing of season four. To Joel becoming Sheila’s newest pupil, to Abby embarking upon a fledgling romance with Eric whilst rising through the ranks of an ancient order of zombie-killers, to Sheila’s new ass-kicking team of an old lady, a camp coward and a reformed zombie killer.

Definitely something to look forward to.