It’s hard to imagine how Barry would work without Hader, whose performance is extraordinary. In moments when Barry’s doing his job, he’s a shuffling automaton, devoid of charisma, inwardly wincing with every shot he fires off. He can be frightening, but only because he’s so efficient at what he does—the show defiantly resists glamorizing any part of the violence it portrays. But in the scenes where Barry attends acting class, Hader’s elasticized face conveys someone having a profound awakening. Barry’s eyes become animated. His jaw relaxes. You root for him more fiercely than you’ve ever rooted for a difficult TV antihero, because what he wants is so representative of all anybody wants, in the end. The question the show asks is, Can you move on from murder?

The field of comedies about killing people is surprisingly rich right now. Netflix and Channel 4’s recent series The End of the F***ing World presented a love story between a disaffected teenager and the wannabe psychopath intent on murdering her that turned out to be unexpectedly charming in the end. Also on Netflix, the second season of Santa Clarita Diet arrives on Friday, starring Drew Barrymore as Sheila, one half of a suburban husband-and-wife realtor team who’s lamentably undead. The first 10 episodes of that show used Sheila’s newfound zombie state as an allegory for the challenges marriages face in midlife, when identities shift and people seek out ways to invigorate their lives. Santa Clarita Diet, in madcap and extremely gruesome fashion, poked at the many layers contained in “till death do us part.”

The second season, still overseen by the show’s creator, Victor Fresco (Better Off Ted), could have gone in any number of directions. It could have dealt with Sheila’s worsening condition, in which her extremities were starting to decay and fall off, and her bloodlust was peaking. It could have leaned fully in to the zombie-comedy template, bringing an apocalypse of the undead upon Los Angeles County. Instead, it remains as static and unyielding as it’s possible for a 10-episode comedy series to be. It was always a comedy with a single punchline, as Matt Zoller Seitz wrote in Vulture last year: Sheila, a sweet, goofy suburban mom, suddenly enjoys killing people and eating them. But in its sophomore season, the cracks in such a narrow premise are starting to show. Santa Clarita Diet has accomplished actors and great one-liners but its stakes are stuck at sea level. Even when it fleetingly considers the morality of murder, the series is prone to take the easiest path possible and then wrap it up in a gag about undesirable body parts (Sheila loves fingers but compares thumbs to “the ends of bread”).

That’s not to say simple comedies can’t be rewarding, or that every new series has to commit to moral philosophizing as earnestly as The Good Place. But it’s hard to reconcile such a provocative premise and such a glib tone. Any tenuous objections to murdering people for food that Sheila and her husband, Joel (Timothy Olyphant), might have are swiftly dispelled when the pair discover a Nazi softball team in Santa Clarita. Fresco seems far more interested in the small-scale moments in middle-class life (Joel spends three episodes talking about a bookshelf he wants to build out of cherry wood) than in the life-or-death situation he’s gotten his characters into.