The fact that the upcoming Drew Barrymore-starring Netflix comedy series Santa Clarita Diet has some horror genre elements managed to fly under the radar because all that had been known about the show up to this point was the following synopsis:
In the single-camera series, Joel and Sheila are husband and wife realtors leading vaguely discontented lives in the L.A. suburb of Santa Clarita, until Sheila goes through a dramatic change sending both their lives down a road of death and destruction… but in a good way.
"Death and destruction" aside, there's no indication that there's going to be anything horrific in that story. But as it turns out, the "dramatic change" Sheila goes through is death, from which she returns as a zombie with some of the undead's typically unconventional cravings. When the show introduces us to Sheila, she has been exposed to something that is making her feel a bit off. Soon she's chowing down on raw meat, and by the end of the first season she'll have moved on to human flesh.
While Sheila becomes a flesh-eating zombie, she also goes through some other changes over the course of the season. As Barrymore says,
What if she finds herself, and we do this sort of Cro-Magnon type of evolution with her over the course of the 10 episodes. No gimmicks, no prosthetics, just an awakening. I just really enjoyed just shedding a snakeskin with her, so it became a really fun obstacle that I wasn't even planning for but seemed so conducive and fun and healthy for my own life."
Santa Clarita Diet's main objective is to make you laugh, but I am very interested in seeing how the whole "eating people" aspect of the show plays out.
Created by Victor Fresco, the series also stars Timothy Olyphant, Liv Hewson, Skyler Gisondo, Ricardo Chavira, Mary Elizabeth Ellis, and Richard T. Jones, with a guest appearance by Nathan Fillion.
All 10 episodes of Santa Clarita Diet will be available to binge watch on Netflix as of February 3rd.