There's a darkly comic bite to the premise of 'Santa Clarita Diet', now streaming on Netflix, which meshes zombie horror with a comedy of manners about marital upheavals in the suburbs.
Drew Barrymore and Timothy Olyphant are humdrum real estate agents Sheila and Joel Hammond. Once high-school sweethearts, their marriage is now in a tedious rut, the dreariness of which is alleviated by Joel doing a little dagga or trying to cope with their sarcastic teenage daughter, Abby.
To top it all a rival estate agent is planning to steal their clients.
What could get worse? Well, inexplicably and in circumstances that are intentionally left vague, Sheila gets very ill. There's some intense vomiting. Her heartbeat disappears altogether and her bloodless veins start to ooze a dark, tar-like substance. She is now undead: a zombie.
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Except Sheila's unlike any zombie we've ever encountered. She's not the slow-lurching, brain-dead ghoul of the ilk spawned by George Romero's classic Night of the Living Dead.
Instead, we have a rather more chipper and breezy entity altogether. And why not? This, after all, is southern California, land of boundless optimism.
Unfortunately, for all her sass there's still that intense craving for human flesh, and this is where things get rather gory as Joel and Sheila evolve into serial killers to satisfy Sheila's insatiable hunger.
Annoying neighbours, hapless strangers and potential clients are all despatched for the pot, so to speak.
Sheila has taken to cannibalism with a gusto that is often difficult to reconcile with Barrymore's ditzy blonde comic default mode, and it can be quite unsettling watching her lapse into stone-faced cruelty as she trails after her next meal.
She does get some killer lines, though. In the fourth episode she blends a smoothie from chunks of frozen corpse and takes part in a power walk. Other women admire her seemingly boundless energy. Sheila tells them she's upped her protein intake. "How many grams?" they ask. "All of them," she replies.
WATCH the trailer for Santa Clarita Diet
Touchingly, Sheila's "condition" provides the spark that seems to revitalise her marriage. Joel is now, like, totally committed to helping his wife meet her dietary needs. But, for all the family bonding, supper time can still be an unsettling business.
Admittedly, Santa Clarita Diet won't be, ahem, to everyone's taste. But creator Victor Fresco has given the series a quirkiness and a knowing sense of humour that never lets the comedy get too dark.
• This article was first published in The Times.
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