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Netflix Santa Clarita Diet

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#1 ·
‘Santa Clarita Diet,’ With Drew Barrymore and Timothy Olyphant
By Sonia Saraiya, Variety.com - Feb. 1, 2016

Don’t eat dinner while watching “Santa Clarita Diet.” Don’t even eat popcorn. You may think you’re sitting down to watch a situational comedy about a married couple in Southern California, but there’s quite a twist. Entrails, to be exact.

“Santa Clarita Diet” is a comedy about how suburban real estate agent Sheila (Drew Barrymore) turns into a creature of the undead, with a ravenous hunger for human flesh. It’s a wacky, odd production, with a spare mythology of horror and a penchant for surprising, stomach-turning gore. In an early episode, Sheila — hungry, but out of any nearby bodies to devour — bargains a foot off of an unethical mortician. She tears into it as if it’s a turkey leg at a county fair, gnawing at a flap of skin until it slowly peels off. In the first episode, actuated by apparent sexual desire, she relieves a man of his fingers. This escalates until the man is disemboweled on her nice green lawn and Sheila is covered in blood.

Hilarious, right?

“Santa Clarita Diet” is a treat for a very specific sense of humor — and a little unpleasant for everyone else. It’s B-movie camp, set in the Los Angeles suburbs; in between eating people, Sheila, with her devoted husband, Joel (Timothy Olyphant), sells ranch houses with plush-carpeted rooms.

Both Barrymore and Olyphant commit with deadpan brilliance to the ridiculous story, playing self-conscious camp with admirable balance. “Santa Clarita Diet” flirts a bit with the horror genre before shifting to crime, as Joel and Sheila evolve into conspiring murderers to sate Sheila’s hunger. Sheila, now ruled by undead desires, sometimes launches into devouring people by accident — which is probably good for their overall success rate, as Joel turns out to be pretty terrible at delivering the killing stroke. (He’s a pro at cleanup, though.)

What is genuinely great about “Santa Clarita Diet” is just how surprising each plot development is. Because it is unafraid to dabble in gore, murder, or high school drama, the show is capable of moving in a lot of different directions. In the midst of a dark comedy with bloody humor, Joel has to mourn the woman his wife once was — a slightly pathetic, somewhat affecting display of pathos that is both funny and sad, even as Sheila, half-mad with zombie-like hunger, has to try to remember that she has to make sacrifices for the people she loves.

Like so many Netflix comedies, “Santa Clarita Diet” is a slow burn, and the first batch of episodes doesn’t quite deliver the sendup of suburbanite foibles that it could. But the seeds are all there. In one brilliant sequence in the fourth episode, Sheila chips some meat off of a frozen corpse and tosses it into her blender, making a smoothie she can take on her ladies’ power walk. The other women admire her energy. She tells them she’s really upped her protein intake. (“How many grams?” “All of them!”) Barrymore is particularly gifted at tempering California-girl ditziness with inscrutable spurts of stone-faced sadism, stalking unassuming strangers like a tiny tiger cub with its first prey. She takes to cannibalism like a house on fire, savoring her chunks of human meat over a family-bonding dinner with Joel and their daughter, Abby (Liv Hewson), without a trace of shame or self-doubt.

It is disconcertingly hilarious how easily devouring human body parts and cleaning up after dead bodies becomes part of their daily routine; with good-old-fashioned Southern California optimism, Sheila converts her cheeriness at being a cannibal into encouraging her friends to go out and live their lives to the fullest. This inspirational speech leads to two different sets of people buying Range Rovers.

It’s hard to imagine “Santa Clarita Diet” will work for everyone. The show is deliberately stylized and devoid of most, if not all, moral consequences. But in the specific juggling act it is attempting, it nails it — a very strange marriage of tone, content, and performance, but one that is much more satisfying than a cold piece of foot.

'Santa Clarita Diet'
Comedy, 10 episodes (4 reviewed): Netflix, Fri. Feb. 3. 30 min.

http://variety.com/2017/tv/reviews/t...ix-1201967495/
 
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#5 ·
‘Santa Clarita Diet,’ With Drew Barrymore and Timothy Olyphant
By Sonia Saraiya, Variety.com - Feb. 1, 2016
I'm in. Nobody handles the difficult combination of charm and weirdness better than Olyphant and Barrymore. Thanks for the tip!
 
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#11 ·
We finished this. Wow, that was pretty darn funny and Timothy makes the show. The geeky neighbor was the second best thing on the show. Soooo many incredibly great one liners. The writing is awesome. Last couple episodes were not as funny as the others but overall we really enjoyed this.
 
#12 ·
I have now watched the first five episodes of Santa Clarita Diet and have been hugely entertained. Some of the one liners have been great. My favorite so far was this one from Episode 2: “That’s Bunchen [the comic book store clerk]. He has a masters in art history but lives in his mother’s basement, so he’s angry.” Received a text from my daughter this morning asking if I had been watching the show. She and my son in law have been enjoying it as much as I have.

I should add that Santa Clarita Diet is one of the few Netflix shows to to be shown with both UHD and HDR. It looks great on my UHD HDR TV.
 
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#16 ·
Hmmm... I love dark humor and can handle gore, and I find projectile vomiting hilarious for some reason (I loved that one scene in Team America), but the gratuitous gross-outs in this wore thin quickly. I turned it off when she ate the snail 20 minutes into the first episode. Does it get any better, or does the show just keep piling on (and pushing the envelope) with the gross-outs?
 
#17 ·
There is a lot of that but it has mostly appealed to me. For example in a later episode Sheila and Joel move and then try to dispose of a dead body. Some of that reminded me of some of the stuff in Weekend at Bernie's. The best part of the show to me at least, though, has been its many funny one liners.
 
#19 ·
Just watched the season and I loved it honestly. I laughed throughout and found the performances uniformly great. I genuinely enjoyed just about all the characters, and they really seem to play off each other well. Timothy Olyphant is surprisingly funny in particular. This one really surprised me. I think I'm still laughing.
 
#27 ·
I'm enjoying it, but I enjoy slapstick humor in general. 'Angie Tribeca' leaves me in stitches. But the writing here isn't quite as sharp as I prefer, and many of the punch lines fall flat. The cast is giving it their all, and Tim & Drew are chewing scenery by the truck full, but the great writing that defines a great comedy just isn't there for me.
 
#29 ·
I'll chime in and agree with everyone that Timothy Olyphant is brilliant in this, better than Barrymore in most scenes. He just steals the show. Their teenage daughter is pretty great as well (both the actress and the character).

One more episode to go, and I'm loving it. So glad it's a half-hour comedy, if they'd tried to drag each episode out to 45+ minutes I think the extra padding would make it fall flat.
 
#31 ·
I'm glad I stuck with this in spite of my initial concerns during the first episode it would basically be little more than an unending stream of successively more graphic gross-out scenes. I've laughed out loud multiple times during every episode thus far (through ep. 7) and always have a smile on my face while watching. And I say that as someone who rarely watches sit-coms anymore, or at least when I do I generally stop watching once the show's main gimmick/premise starts to wear thin (I couldn't get past 5 episodes of Kimmy Schmidt, for example).
 
#33 ·
Around the office, when people talk about TV shows, almost always someone will say something like, "Oh, have you seen this new one on Netflix about the wife turns into a zombie...." Everyone here raves over this series and highly recommends it.


I sure hope there is a second season but no word yet.
 
#34 ·
Santa Clarita Diet is a hoot. Drew Barrymore and Timothy Olyphant are both delightful. The show took a little getting used at first but once I got into the swing of things I laughed a lot and was well entertained.
 
#35 ·
Yeah, we're warming up to it as well. I still don't think it's a brilliant example of situation comedy and the writing is relatively weak compared to the genre standouts, but Olyphant is great, Barrymore is very good, and 21 year old Skyler Gisondo (Eric) has terrific comic timing in the Michael Cera mold - he might be my favorite character. That kid's got a bright future.
 
#37 ·
'Santa Clarita Diet' Renewed for Season 2 at Netflix
By Jackie Strause, The Hollywood Reporter's 'Live Feed' Blog - Mar. 29, 2017

Santa Clarita Diet is ready for a second helping.

The zombie comedy, starring Drew Barrymore and Timothy Olyphant, will return for a second season in 2018, Netflix confirmed Wednesday. The streamer dropped the news with a video announcement that spelled out the number "2" with body parts before posing the question, "Ready for seconds?"

Production begins on season two this summer.

Santa Clarita Diet, which hails from creator Victor Fresco, follows Sheila (Barrymore), a once happily married wife to Joel (Olyphant) and mother to Abby (Liv Hewson), as she and her suburban family adjust to her new life as an overnight zombie.

The 10-episode first season was released Feb. 3 and is now streaming. The episode count for the show's sophomore run is not yet known.

The series received largely positive reviews, with THR TV critic Daniel Fienberg praising the chemistry between Barrymore and Olyphant.

Santa Clarita Diet joins a robust slate of Netflix comedies that also includes Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Grace and Frankie, Love, Master of None, Fuller House, The Ranch, Lady Dynamite, Haters Back Off and One Day at a Time.

The single-camera half-hour marks Barrymore's first series- regular role and is one of two TV series she's involved with this year. She also serves as narrator for Ellen DeGeneres' upcoming unscripted NBC dating show First Dates, premiering next month.

Watch the second season video announcement below. [CLICK LINK]

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/liv...eason-2-989677
 
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