Santa Clarita Diet - The Book

There are times where “Santa Clarita Diet” just needs a laugh track and could be firmly in the comfortable arms of the sitcom comedy. Heck, “The Ranch” has a laugh track, “Santa Clarita Diet” just needed to go one step further. Abby was pulled over by a cop while riding the unregistered motorcycle of the OD’d chop shop black leather jacket. Thankfully she has a name to drop, and Rick brings her home with Sheila and Joel appropriately irate all things considering. Abby drops to her parents she might not want to go to college and flippantly goes to her room acknowledging her punishment of being grounded. Olyphant and Barrymore go the route of sitcom comic acting, so I think if you watch “Friends” or its ilk where actors/actresses sort of emote a bit more than usual (this show isn’t subtle nor does it pretend to be) this might go down a bit better. It is a zom com where Barrymore requests Olyphant to pop her eye back in as it “fell out”, so you sort of know what to expect time in and time out with this show. But I do like the zingers like when Eric’s mom, Lisa, talks to Joel about how Dan’s partner (clearly now Lisa’s lover) “comes all the time” or how Eric tells Joel that Dan called conventions involving the paranormal “para-not-normal” or Joel trying to explain murdering Dan to Eric (Abby told Eric) as the two attempt to rationalize killing somebody. There is the eye gag with Abby wearing the OD’d chop shop leather jacket’s Pussy Machine leather jacket, returning the taken motorcycle back to the storage unit, Sheila encouraging her to do the right thing, when they find the dead guy’s equally crude and profane brother barking at them (no return of either the money or motorcycle parts the guy kept to himself). My favorite line is Eric telling Joel (who is intimidating to the paranormal crowd at the con) he resembles the Christ statue overlooking Rio. At the convention, Joel believes he might just have found the key to getting his wife a cure, when a conspiracy theorist, popular with the crowd there (and online), reveals to him that he is a fraud with no book (he just wants to impress these unfortunate con fans who seem to follow his every word with great interest; Anton (Derek Waters) preys on their naïveté), but a necrobiologist attending (Ravi Patel) gives Joel the card for a scientist, Dr. Cora Wolf (Portia de Rossi). Joel scares Anton in a funny moment in the bathroom, threatening to punch him, while telling him not to pee. Eric has another funny line about Joel going a bit too “Jack Bauer” in his approach to questioning Anton, later revealed by Patel’s Ryan to have used Sheila’s situation for an “undead subreddit”. Meanwhile, Sheila and Abby try to get the brother of the dead chop shopper to open the storage unit without resorting to violence…surprisingly, they decide not to after trying a tear-gas-down-the-storage-unit-ventilation-shaft attempt to smoke the guy out doesn’t work according to plan or the use of some “kiddie music” on max. Sheila and Abby have some good mother/daughter time together, addressing the possibility that Sheila might not be around to see Abby accomplish a lot as she becomes a young woman. 3/5