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By cancelling the bloody brilliant Santa Clarita Diet, Netflix has bitten off more than it can chew

Bloody ridiculous: Timothy Olyphant and Drew Barrymore, stars of the now cancelled Santa Clarita Diet - Netflix
Bloody ridiculous: Timothy Olyphant and Drew Barrymore, stars of the now cancelled Santa Clarita Diet - Netflix

Santa Clarita Diet was never one of Netflix’s big hitters. It didn’t inspire much in the way of watercooler talk, or breathless next-day online recaps. It didn’t stink of money the way The Crown does, or enjoy undiluted awards success of Black Mirror. Instead, Santa Clarita Diet was too small and weird for that. If you couldn’t locate its frequency, it left you cold. But if you could, you loved it.

I could, and I did, and that’s why I’m so sad that it isn't around any more.

On Friday, Netflix announced that Santa Clarita Diet was being axed. The news didn’t just come as a surprise to viewers, but also apparently to the makers of the show, which ended its third season on an unresolved moment that would have spun the series off in a brand new direction. But we’ll never know what’ll happen now, and it stinks.

Shows like Santa Clarita Diet – a screwball suburban comedy about Drew Barrymore’s life as a flesh-eating undead zombie – don’t come along very often. Typically, when you make a television series, the rough edges are gradually sanded away by a succession of producers and executives and focus groups.

But Santa Clarita Diet managed to not only retain its weirdness but revel in it. It had such an amazingly hyper-specific tone, best summarised as "light and breezy extreme body horror", that it’s a miracle it even existed in the first place.

Ostensibly, the series was full of extraordinarily high stakes – there were explosions and Serbian assassins and murder after murder after murder – and yet Santa Clarita Diet’s charm came from the way the core cast shrugged them off as yet another mundane quotidian bump in the road. It didn’t matter who’d just been stabbed in the brain or eaten alive; nothing was quite dark enough to interrupt the constant patter of zingy dialogue.

I’m going to miss all of the cast; Drew Barrymore as the suburban realtor who only reached her full potential when possessed by a desperate urge to consume human flesh, Liv Hewson and Skyler Gisondo as the two teens coming to terms with their new lives. But, at least for me, I’ll miss Timothy Olyphant the most.

As Joel, Barrymore’s husband, he was an absolute revelation. Until Santa Clarita Diet, I’d only known him for his brooding; as Raylan Givens on Justified, as a glowering assassin in the Hitman movie, as the main baddie in Die Hard 4. In retrospect, what a waste those roles were.

Drew Barrymore and Timothy Olyphant in Santa Clarita Diet - Credit: Netflix
Drew Barrymore and Timothy Olyphant in Santa Clarita Diet Credit: Netflix

Timothy Olyphant, it turns out, is a born comic actor with timing to die for. He dazzled in every single scene he was in. He had that rare gift of being able to simultaneously commit to a scene while acknowledging to the audience how silly it was. Physically gifted and verbally dextrous, watching Timothy Olyphant on Santa Clarita Diet was like suddenly discovering that Tony Soprano was a world-class tapdancer on the side. He was immense, and I only hope he quickly manages to find another role that fits his skillset this perfectly.

I’m not alone in my love for the series, either. Twitter went into something of a spiral at the news of its end. Even as I write this, days after the announcement, fans are tweeting Netflix several times a minute, berating it for its decision. They’re pointing to its 100% Rotten Tomatoes scores, and complaining that Netflix is throwing its money at lousy teen dramas like 13 Reasons Why, and screenshotting their Netflix cancellation emails. This sort of fan uproar is brilliant to witness. If nothing else, it demonstrates how much people loved the thing.

So why did it die? There are plenty of theories. There’s the possibility that it wasn't helped by one of the most divisive first episodes in living memory, complete with a scene where America’s Sweetheart Drew Barrymore drenches the walls and floor of a bathroom in thick projectile vomit, which understandably put a few people off. Between that, the zombie spiders made of livid undulating flesh and the chatty decomposing heads in vases, it didn’t exactly present itself as something for the family to sit down and watch together.

And then there’s the title, which was just inexcusably inept. Remember, this was a Netflix show, and Netflix is essentially just an infinite number of submenus full of boxes. We’ve all wasted hours of our lives scrolling through millions of boxes looking for something – anything – to watch, so it helps if a show can sell itself quickly.

As a zany sitcom about chatty zombies, Santa Clarita Diet had a hard enough time finding an audience no matter what it was called, but giving it such an oblique, unrelated, geographically specific title can’t have helped it at all.

Which brings us to Netflix itself. Last week the Hollywood Reporter published an article about Netflix’s tendency to cut shows like Santa Clarita off in their prime. As a business, it relies on new subscribers for growth, which means the onus will always be on launching splashy new shows. People are much more likely to sign up to Netflix to see why everyone is making such a fuss about a hot new series like Russian Doll, not because there’s a new season of a programme they’ve never really heard of.

As one insider told the Hollywood Reporter, a show like Santa Clarita Diet is “one of 500 boxes on [a] screen, and when they pay to put 10 more episodes up, all that happens is there are 10 more episodes behind that box. Ted Sarandos has to decide, 'Is anybody going to subscribe to Netflix because of more episodes behind that box?'" In short, a Netflix show loses worth the longer it continues, even one as rabidly adored as Santa Clarita Diet.

Santa Clarita Diet - Credit: Netflix
Santa Clarita Diet Credit: Netflix

This might explain Netflix's fondness for ditching shows after a handful of years. Santa Clarita Diet isn't unique by a long shot; in the last few months Netflix has ditched hits like One Day at a Time, Friends From College, its George RR Martin series and its entire Marvel stable. And while this behaviour might make sense in the short term, it might eventually cause Netflix strife.

After all, in America its most-watched shows are imported repeats like Friends and The Office. When these shows go elsewhere - and they will, because they're proven successes in an increasingly splintered market - then what will Netflix have left? A ton of shows that last for three seasons and then end without warning?

That doesn't exactly sound desirable. At the very least, Netflix should learn the grace to let these shows conclude properly before binning them, just for the sake of completion.

But theorising about the death of Santa Clarita Diet isn’t going to bring it back. We should probably try to get used to a life without it. Still, at least the three seasons that do exist aren’t going anywhere. Santa Clarita Diet will always live on as a box on a menu, ready to be rewatched at a moment’s notice. In that sense, it will never truly die. Maybe the real undead nightmare was Netflix’s homepage all along.