Admittedly, zombies aren’t my favorite sub-genre to explore—I think they’ve been mostly mined and explored across titles like The Walking Dead, Maggie, and beyond. While the Santa Clarita Diet is dealing with the “undead” rather than zombies per se, it still explores a lot of new theories with the concept. However, some of the moments that leaned heaviest into the undead tropes were my least favorite from the season.

Watching Sheila and Joel troubleshoot their new lives as a team resonated a lot more for me than the moments that were just another shot of a bloody-faced Sheila snarling into someone’s arm. It’s material that still works but we’re almost numbed to it as a culture by now. Again, fortunately this show doesn’t bank on the shock of its content alone, but if it were to, this would be a much hollower, less successful show. It doesn’t hurt that Ruben Fleischer of Zombieland fame directs a handful of episodes, too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjRnbOgoAUQ

The humor offered up in the series is certainly a mixed bag. There’s an outrageous scene in the pilot involving projectile vomiting that I really wasn’t sure what to make of, but then later there’s Sheila laying down some “foreplay” with Joel that made me laugh out loud and is so goddamn shocking. That’s the sort of stuff I expect from this show and thankfully after a few opening hiccups the series delivers and sticks these incredulous landings.

Sheila’s undead-ness leads to some very unusual visual gags that will have you wincing between laughs. The gore is also so over the top and delightful and mixes with the suburbia elements perfectly. Often this show felt reminiscent of the dark, dark comedy that accompanied the first few episodes of Breaking Bad. Fresco finds a wonderful balance here that is a ton of fun to watch. It tonally feels like Pushing Daisies mixed with Breaking Bad, with a dash of Dexter thrown in, too.

Joel inevitably is given the plots where he’s researching Sheila’s condition and the occult-ish areas that surround it, while Sheila is just more concerned with living life and blending in. Her condition naturally exposes itself around the neighborhood in the most pleasant of ways. It becomes a bit of a predictable basic structure at times, but it’s one that very much works for the show and is a relaxed feel that’s easy to get behind.