It’s been a year since we watched season one of the wacky Netflix Original Santa Clarita Diet with a shocked but wildly amused grimace on our faces. The series gave us an entirely new scenario of the “perfect suburban life” and stars Drew Barrymore as a wild, ultra modern take on the undead. The episodes are 20 minutes long, so we easily watched it over a weekend, then found ourselves indulgently satisfied but oddly unfussed about the second season.
Well, the second season came out this month and we bloody loved it – bloody being the operative word here. It’s gruesome, gory, gutsy, gross and disgustingly hilarious. We were barely fifteen minutes into the season when Sheila (Drew Barrymore) violently disemboweled a man with her teeth in her sparkling clean soon-to-be-drenched-in-blood-and-guts kitchen.
The series continues to illuminate the pressures and desires of being a “normal”, perfect family in American Suburbia, comically in spite of the Sheila’s transformation. All the performances are brilliant, especially by Liv Hewson, who is naturally engaging and is fantastic in her portrayal of Abby, Barrymore’s on-screen daughter. Her character is the most “normal” in the sense that she is the one we can empathize with and relate to sincerely among the chaos. When the other characters try to be “normal” it becomes so utterly absurd that they become almost impossible to take seriously.
The way the series so far ends has us excited for the next season, and there was something so weirdly entertaining about the characters and the bombastic gore that many people have found themselves going back to season 1 for a re-watch – myself being one of them.
