Spoiler alert! This article contains spoilers for the end of Santa Clarita Diet, so proceed at your own risk!
Netflix's Santa Clarita Diet is probably not at all what you thought it was when you first heard about it.
The suburban Santa Clarita setting isn't a surprise, and neither is Drew Barrymore's presence as a suburban mom and realtor who finds a new lease on life thanks to her new diet, it's the diet itself that becomes the surprise, since, you know, Barrymore's character is now eating people.
In the pilot of the series, which came out on Friday, the somewhat bland Sheila (Barrymore) throws up her entire body weight—including what looks like might be an organ—and dies, but then wakes up as a zombie. From then on, she only has a taste for human flesh, but she's happier, more energetic, and loving life more than she ever has before. She also no longer feels pain and at first, other than the dietary requirements, it seems like things aren't so bad.
Throughout the 10 episodes, everything unravels for Sheila, her husband Joel (Timothy Olyphant), and their teenage daughter, Abby (Liv Hewson). Eventually, we learn that there are a few more downsides to being a zombie, like your bodyparts falling off.
We only saw Sheila lose a toe so far, and while Dr. Wolf (a surprise Portia De Rossi) described some eventual aggression (according to her rat test subjects), viewers barely seen any of the signs of a zombie that they're used to—even on iZombie, the show where the zombie solves mysteries.
TV's biggest zombie show, The Walking Dead, debuted on AMC in 2010 with a pretty typical portrayal of zombies (even though they're not called zombies, and they exist in a world where zombie fiction does not exist). They're ugly, they're slow, their flesh is falling off, and all they want to do is eat you. They don't want to solve a mystery, and they couldn't if they tried. They would struggle to shuffle their way out of a paper bag. They're bad to be around, and there's no question about that, but they have no decision-making capabilities. They're just hungry.
Of course, the real villains on The Walking Dead are the living, breathing people who do have decision-making capabilities, and who use them to murder and torture people. The walkers just kind of make it more dangerous to go outside if you're bad at running, and besides—many very fun people will tell you that the walking dead referred to in the title are actually the ones who are still alive.
In a similar vein, Syfy has Z Nation, which is another zombie apocalypse series, but this time, there's a guy who is completely immune to zombie bites, and he needs to get to a CDC lab in California. The zombies are similar to The Walking Dead, but they're a little faster, and the show itself is a little more fun and a little less gloomy. For instance, there's such things as zombie babies and zombie tornadoes. Zombie anything, really, but it's pretty much what you'd think of when you hear the word zombie.
Over on the CW, there's a little underrated show called iZombie. Just like The Walking Dead, it's based on a comic book, but the show and its idea of zombies could not be more different. For starters, its main character is a zombie, and she eats brains (and only the brains) in order to gain the memories of dead people and help solve their murders.
Like in Santa Clarita Diet, Liv (Rose McIver) became a new woman after her death and zombie rebirth. Before, she was a workaholic, studying to become a doctor and often forgetting to actually live. Her name is even Liv Moore, which is what she gets to do now that she's dead and working in a morgue so she has easy access to brains and murder mysteries.
For the most part, Liv is just like her fully living, human friends, other than her platinum hair and super pale skin. She even eats the brains like they're normal meat, and cooks them into meatballs or taco meat. When she's fully fed, she takes on aspects of the personality of whoever she ate. When she's hungry, she gets a little moody, and a little aggressive, and her eyes get a little redder. Her zombie-ism came from a particular formula of a drug called Utopium. Other formulas have created other kinds of zombies that look much more like the version you'd see on The Walking Dead, and who act like them, too.
However, on iZombie, the zombie is the hero, and sometimes a zombie is also the villain. At the end of the second season, a new zombie showed up with plans to turn Seattle into a city full of zombies who are allowed to live and eat freely, and season three (which premieres April 4) will find Liv dealing with whether she should fight or join in on that plan. On this show, zombies have gone from having a hopefully curable disease to being a new, complicated kind of people, like the X-Men.
Now, we have Santa Clarita Diet, where stereotypes of both zombies and suburban moms (and even realtors) are being twisted around completely. Sheila's zombieism gives her no special powers other than a new attitude that makes her death much more pleasant and interesting than it sounds like her life was. It also makes her murder people so she can eat them, but murder aside, becoming a zombie is probably the best thing that's happened to both her sex life and her social life in a very long time.
Sure, by the end of the season, her husband has been arrested and she's chained up in the basement after trying to get an old Serbian woman to vomit into a bucket, but there's probably never been another zombie who's felt so alive.
Santa Clarita Diet is now streaming on Netflix.