Timothy Olyphant's 10/10 Horror Series Still Deserves a Second Chance

Published Sep 1, 2026, 7:18 PM EDT Lloyd 'Happy Trails' Farley: the man, the myth, the legend. What can be said about this amazing - and humble - man that hasn't been said before? Or, more accurately, what can be said in public? Born in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, Lloyd is a master of puns and a humorist, who has authored one pun book to date - Pun and Grimeish Mint - and is working on a second. His time with Collider has allowed Lloyd's passion for writing to explode, with nearly 1,000 articles to his name that have been published on the site, with his favorite articles being the ones that allow for his sense of humor to shine. Lloyd also holds fast to the belief that all of life's problems can be answered by The Simpsons, Star Wars, and/or The Lion King. You can read more about Lloyd on his website, or follow his Facebook page and join the Llama Llegion. Happy trails! Horror comedies, by their very nature, are dark, and the best of the lot – Ash vs Evil Dead or What We Do in the Shadows, for example – find a balance between horror and comedy that, more often than not, elicits laughs over things one probably shouldn't be laughing about. And in 2017, Netflix added its own entry to the list: Santa Clarita Diet. Starring Drew Barrymore and Timothy Olyphant, the series puts a spin on the zombie genre that hilariously bucks its conventions altogether. Now, seven years after its original run, the show deserves a revival. 'Santa Clarita Diet' Brings the Zombie Genre to Suburbia The premise of Santa Clarita Diet is simple: suburban mom Sheila (Barrymore) turns into a zombie. No, she wasn't bitten by another zombie, nor is she resurrected by a virus as a mindless walker after dying, à la The Walking Dead. Sheila ate some bad Serbian clams, which results in her projectile vomiting – think Regan in The Exorcist, only a lot more pea soup and what might be an organ – as she and her husband Joel (Olyphant), real estate agents, are showing a home to a group of potential buyers. A concerned Joel takes her to the emergency department, but after waiting an inane amount of time and getting no closer to seeing anyone (a thinly veiled shot at the state of health care), they return home. After all, she's fine, apart from a red-hot libido and the absence of a heartbeat. Eric (Skyler Gisondo), the teenager next door, just so happens to know a lot about strange happenings. Sheila's situation definitely fits the bill, and he's got the answer: Sheila is a zombie. And that's where the comedy, and the horror, of Santa Clarita Diet stems from. Sheila doesn't look like a zombie, not even remotely, and if that's what she is (SPOILER: she is), she's the peppiest, most bright-eyed zombie ever. But she certainly eats like one, and despite efforts at alternatives, she wants humans. The juxtaposition of Sheila's need to eat people, while living her life as normally as she can (making protein shakes by chipping off pieces from frozen human corpses) is pure comedy gold. Ah, but it gets better. Joel treats Sheila's zombiedom as an affliction as opposed to the truly horrible thing that it is, optimistically seeing it as something they can work on together. So now you have Joel, their daughter Abby (Liv Hewson), and Eric hiding bodies and finding "bad people" for Sheila to eat with the same mundane approach one would take to doing household chores or running errands. All this, while generally keeping the idea of picture-perfect suburban family life alive, with an ever-present "there's nothing to see here" veneer. With a deliciously wicked innocence from Barrymore, a rare but welcome comedic turn from Olyphant, absurd cameos from the likes of Nathan Fillion, and overly gratuitous amounts of blood, Santa Clarita Diet is three seasons of horror-comedy perfection. 'Santa Clarita Diet' Deserves To Be Brought Back From the Dead But was three seasons enough? Yes and no. The series ended on a cliffhanger that saw Mr. Ball-Legs (don't ask, just watch) crawl into Joel's ear, forcing Sheila to bite Joel to save his life by ending his life and turning him into the undead. It potentially opened the door to seeing what their lives would be like as an immortal undead couple, which would have been explored in a fourth season (an unsuccessful gamble by the writers to goad Netflix into renewing the show). Santa Clarita Diet had already expanded past its suburban roots to accommodate a backstory about the Knights of Serbia, a secret organization founded during Medieval times to combat the rise of zombies. Once you open the Pandora's Box of a bigger world, you can't cram it back into the suburban setting that is Santa Clarita Diet's biggest strength. There's no need to go past the borders of Santa Clarita to further expand the narrative when there are so many places to take the narrative for the characters we already know. How have Joel and Sheila fared as a zombie couple over the last seven years? What has changed in their lives? Is there a cure for their virus available, and if so, have they taken it? Bringing Santa Clarita Diet back offers fresh opportunities for storylines that simply wouldn't have been available then. That, and there's a delicious irony that's impossible to resist in bringing a series about the undead back from the dead.