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Santa Clarita Diet Series One, Episode One: So. Either A Bat, Or a Monkey

SCD #1.1 

Zombies are, by this point, boring. They became ubiquitous at least around ten years ago and are, by now, shambling shadows of the heydey of Romero - cheap cash in props which long lost the ability to be genuinely scary. What this means is that Santa Clarita Diet is a pleasant surprise as the recently cancelled Netflix show is barely about zombies in the first place. (Although there is something pleasingly well suited to writing about the very beginning of a show when it’s just died). So, if SCD isn’t about zombies - what is it about? Well it’s about Joel and Sheila played by Timothy Olyphant and Drew Barrymore. They live in a sun-bleached paradise of the American suburbs, married with a teenage daughter. To the show’s credit, it actually makes living in the suburbs look accurately terrible. The two live next door to a police officer on one side and a sheriff on the other and their life is a collection of petty frustrations and performed civility towards people they clearly dislike. 

Sheila has a new colleague - a lecherous creep (hilariously played by Nathan Fillion) who has to be placated, and a collection of friends that she seems desperate to escape. Likewise, Joel is frantically trying to navigate a contemporary modernity which seems full of nothing but minor irritations and technological fallibility. Burningly frustrated he sedates himself by smoking weed in his car (to the full knowledge of his wife from whom he’s trying to keep it a secret). All of this goes some way to fleshing out (ha!) what the show is really concerned with - namely, the suppression that is required by the disciplinary systems of the bourgeoisie and the libindial thrill of tearing them all down. Zombies of old were terrifying precisely because they showed what could be taken away from us when we died - the human subject would be reduced to a shambling maw of appetite. The earliest zombie films also have a capitalist critique within them too - think of White Zombie, where even death is no freedom from the demands of labour as the corpse of the colonized is exploited by the imperialist powers of racist capitalism. Later zombie texts generally avoided the capitalist critique instead turning inward towards the individual subject. In the case of the AMC show The Walking Dead, the question is that if all that separates us from the corpse is our life, fragile and contingent, then we are, in so many ways, not all that different from the zombie - we are all infected. 

In SCD death, it seems, is not a diminishing of humanity but an improvement. For Sheila it is a liberation, a sexual liberation (as her teenage daughter remarks ‘they’re doing it. A lot.’) socially liberating and personally liberating. After her death? transformation? which is marked by a frankly hilarious amount of vomit, she even takes the time to tell her husband that she knows about the fact he smokes weed in his car to make his life more manageable and encourages him to be the authentic version of himself, to stop worrying about the frustrations of life and what people might think of him and to start genuinely living. In this there is a neat inverse of the stereotypical set-up - whilst traditionally we are already human and might lose it through death, the show posits that those in the suburbs were dead and it’s only through undeath that you  might come close to a more real and genuine existence. Romero and his shopping mall is where all of this starts, but SCD doesn’t seem interested in what we’ve bought, but what a certain section of bourgeoisie has bought into.  Sheila’s undeath is, ironically enough, a chance for her to actually start LIVING. After all, what’s the worst that could happen? The rules, codes and ideologies of suburban domesticity can be ignored which raises the possibility that suburbia isn’t where you go to when life is going well, suburbia is where you end up when you’ve never really been alive in the first place. There’s something fascinating about this show, horror and comedy are two forms which depend upon ambivalence and whilst it would be easy to decry this as a heteronormative conservative form (which, it is, or at least, it seems that way from the first episode) there is also something strangely interesting about it. 

The final act of the first episode is a great example - Garry, that creepy new colleague has popped up at the bar where the newly dead-alive Sheila finally has the confidence to dance with her neighbours. Joel turns up, and when Garry tries to start something he walks out, knowing that years ago he might have cared less about middle class propriety he would have punched this asshole in the face. Back at their home, Garry tries to sexually assault Sheila who eats two of his fingers before tearing open his shirt and eating his guts. Joel returns to his home and finds his wife covered in blood next to a mangled corpse and she assures him that ‘I wanna make things work.’ Mounting any kind of critique of middle class ideology, presenting something other than stereotypical sitcom marriage (the two actually seem to genuinely care for each other and given the shows tone it’s reminiscent of the greatest Goth couple of all time, Morticia and Gomez) and reimagining the nihilism of the contemporary zombie into something strangely charming? It’s … delicious so far.