Video Game Rack Fighter here with a review of Netflix’s Santa Clarita Diet. Meanwhile, enjoy your BQB free diet because that nerd will never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever write on this blog ever again, ever.
So, Netflix has taken the iZombie idea of a zombie who can still basically function as a human who speaks normally and Dexter, where the protagonist murders bad people, except here she does it for food.
Drew Barrymore and Timothy Olyphant star as suburban California realtors Joel and Sheila Hammond, just another boring couple living a quiet life with daughter Abby (Liv Hewson) on an idyllic cul-de-sac where all the houses look the same.
In the first episode, Sheila inexplicably dies and yet, does not die. SPOILER ALERT: there’s a lot of vomit involved.
Sheila’s heart beat stops, she can be injured without being hurt, she loses control of her base desires and just wants to have sex with her previously sex deprived husband all the time. Clearly, there’s been a big change.
Rather than, you know, consult a doctor, the family brings in a nerd, creepy next-door neighbor kid Eric (Skyler Gisondo). He diagnoses Sheila as a zombie because, you know, he reads comic books and shit so apparently he’s an expert. It’s all presented tongue in cheek and the audience is winked at to just go with it.
There are parts that are funny and parts that are just gross. I feel sad for Timothy Olyphant. I got so used to watching him play the tough cowboy in Justified that it seems depressing to watch him become the stereotypical pussy sitcom dad, completely impotent and unable to get any respect from his wife or kid and left to write sternly worded letters to the company that failed to design his toaster oven properly.
The main rule that all good writers must follow is, “Show, don’t tell.” Viewers prefer to see things happen rather than be told that things happened and yet, at least in the first episode, we are told that things happened rather than shown that things happened.
I almost wondered if that might be a result of the episodes only being a half hour long. With only a half hour, the show comes across as a zany sitcom. With an hour, the characters could be developed more without the characters just blurting out the details of scenes we missed.
The verdict is still out on this show. The first episode had its ups and downs but it was interesting enough to get me to come back for more.
STATUS: Shelf-worthy, and I hope BQB enjoys spooning with Leo McCoy in the Randomtown Motel because he will never be allowed to Netflix and chill with me in BQB HQ ever again.
Also, as a grammar issue, I think the show should be called, “The Santa Clarita Diet.”
OK. I’m about five years late with this complaint, but I guess that’s what happens when shows are preserved forever on Netflix and you can watch them whenever you want.
For the most part, I hate it when there are cast changes on a TV show. If a group of actors/actresses wowed everyone in the first season then every effort should be made to keep the band together.
You don’t change your socks in the bottom of the ninth. To change an actress is to change the character altogether.
In the first season, Last Man Standing was basically Tim Allen taking his winning Home Improvement formula and applying it to modern times.
On Home Improvement, Tim Taylor lusted after power tools, was kept in check by intelligent wife/psychology student Jill, and was a father to three wacky boys. From time to time, he’d seek advice from his TV show co-star Al or his mysterious neighbor, Wilson. During his Tool Time TV show, he’d regale the studio audience with a rant about some subject related to a problem he was experiencing with his family.
On Last Man Standing, the three boys are traded in for three girls. Mike Baxter lusts after crossbows, shotguns and assorted pieces of hunting equipment. He’s kept in check by intelligent wife/geologist Vanessa. He seeks advice from his boss/confidant Ed. In a modern twist, he regales the Outdoor Man website visitors with rants related to some problem he is experiencing with his family.
Symmetry. Gotta love it. Then they ruined it.
In the first season, Mike’s eldest daughter Kristin is played by Alexandra Krosney. Her backstory is that she got pregnant during her senior year of high school, thus destroying all of her college hopes and dreams while leaving Mike with his only male ally in a house full of girls, his little grandson Boyd.
There was definitely a subtle lesson behind that character. The message to young people who have kids way too young is, ok, you made a mistake. But life isn’t over. Kristin gets up everyday, works at a rancid diner, takes care of her son and occasionally takes a college class when she can fit it into her schedule. Mom, Dad and younger sisters pitch in to help Kristin out.
Happy family. Gotta love it. You’re left with a hope that as long as Kristin keeps plugging away, she will eventually get her long awaited award. She’ll get her education and she won’t have to work at a stank ass diner anymore.
Alas, in Season Two, Krosney is replaced by Amanda Fuller. I don’t mean to knock Fuller. She’s playing the character she was hired to play but, this version of Kristin stinks.
Jordan Masterson is brought in to play Boyd’s dad, Ryan, who in the first season had been played by Nick Jonas in a one time guest spot.
New Kristin and Ryan become liberal foils to conservative Mike. What used to be a sweet, funny show about a happy family descends into a weekly political debate show where everyone comes across as though they want to slap the crap out of each other over the latest political happenings of the day.
I have a hunch what the network was trying to do. They essentially moved from modern Home Improvement to modern All in the Family.
If you missed All in the Family, it had the same vibe. Die hard conservative Archie Bunker would go toe to toe with his super liberal daughter Gloria and son-in-law Mike aka Meathead.
People tend to forget that as much of a hard ass Archie Bunker was, Mike and Gloria were, at times, unbearable in their own ways.
Archie had his pros, namely, he was a good provider and the only one in the household with the brains needed to earn a dollar or get any work done. He also had his cons in that he was brutish and harsh, stubborn and set in his ways, though occasionally a heart of gold peeked through.
Mike and Gloria had their pros. They cared about people and the world and were happy go lucky flower children. But they had their cons, namely, neither one of them could work their way out of a wet paper bag and by the end of the show they had ended up a pair of forty year olds dependent on their elderly father/father-in-law because they were too free spirited to figure out how to earn a living on their own.
In short, the show runners, in my opinion anyway, were trying to say, “Hey, look, both sides have some good ideas, and bad ideas, no one has a complete lock on right and wrong and sometimes when people on opposing sides lock horns, all reason is thrown out the window.”
Apparently, the “new and improved” Kristin and Ryan worked enough to keep the show going for years but personally, I liked the first season better. I get they are going for modern day Archie vs. Meathead and Gloria in the form of Mike vs. New Kristin and Ryan, but to me, it just comes across as this once adorable, happy family now hates each other.
Mike, like Archie, is a bit of a hard ass, though nowhere near as hard as Archie. His conservative beliefs clash with New Kristin and Ryan’s liberalism, and the trio spend at least half of every show duking it out in a war of ideology.
Like Archie, Mike is a good provider, but he does try to foist his beliefs on his kids. Like Meathead and Gloria, New Kristin and Ryan believe their way is the best to help people, but they do come off as ungrateful brats who boinked one night in high school and now they expect their father/father-in-law to raise and pay for their kid for them but they still want to lecture him on how to do it and tell him that he’s doing a shitty job when they should be thanking him for being there for them.
All I know is I just end up missing the happy family that loved each other in season one.
Plus, the bitter political divide the country suffers from can be seen everywhere. Did we really need to see it on this show too?
Anyway. Thanks for listening to my five year old complaint, America. Bring back Alexandra Krosney.
Blah. I don’t know if I’ll even bother to keep watching it.
A single mom, two kids and a hot eighty-five year old reboot the Norman Lear classic sitcom, exclusively on Netflix.
BQB here with a review of One Day at a Time.
As a Gen X-er (I swear we exist), I have vague memories of the original One Day at a Time. Single mom Bonnie Franklin balanced raising two daughters, a job and a friendship with a wacky landlord during a time when TV viewers were just starting to accept seeing divorced characters in lead roles on TV.
I recall the show being mildly interesting but it wasn’t, say Facts of Life or Family Ties or one of those 1980s shows that has been handed down through the ages. It was one of those shows that you’d watch while you were waiting for one of those other big shows to watch. I can’t remember much from it other than it introduced the world to Valerie Bertinelli.
The show’s been rebooted with a modern flair with a Cuban-American family. Justina Machado stars as single mother/Afghanistan war veteran/nurse Penelope. She juggles her day job, raising two kids, her “I’ve made a deal with the devil to keep looking this young” mother Rita Moreno and a friendship with wacky landlord Schneider, who has been given a hipster makeover for modern times.
It has all of the sitcom cheesiness: canned laughter, silly jokes, formulaic plots and so on. The family faces millennial problems that Bonnie Franklin couldn’t have dreamed of, i.e. daughter Isabella refuses to have a quinceanara because she thinks it is an outdated, misogynistic ritual, for example.
At any rate, the show is a good example of a reboot done right. It takes a show that was popular back in the day but didn’t really develop a long lasting, post-run fan base, capitalizes on the name and the plot formula, yet makes it fresh and new.
And besides, Schneider was a hipster before hipsters even existed.
If you were alive in the 1990s, chances are you, at least one time in your life, turned on your TV to watch Tim Allen grunt like a gorilla as he played with power tools.
Home Improvement was born out of Allen’s stand-up schtick in which he poked fun at men who begin playing with power tools only to feel surges of testosterone that cause them to regress into primates. The schtick evolved into a show in which Tim would work on his home improvement television show by day then be a father at night.
I’m very late to the Last Man Standing party, mainly because I believe that by and large, the sitcom formula, though not technically dead, is certainly on life support. Cheesy jokes, holding back on swears, formulaic plots, cookie cutter characters – all out the window ever since cable TV started producing their own television shows.
However, I noticed it was on Netflix the other day and feeling nostalgic for my youth in which Tim “the Tool Man” Taylor was one of celebrity father figures my TV offered me, I checked out and yeah, I have to admit, as cheesy as it is, it offered me an occasional laugh or two.
Allen has recycled his gorilla grunting tool man schtick into the form of Mike Baxter, an executive of sorts at “Outdoor Man,” a large Bass Pro Shop/Cabella’s type sporting goods store.
By day, Mike sells crossbows, knives, and hunting equipment, complaining about how unmanly men have got all the while. By night, he reconciles his macho tendencies with the fact that he is outnumbered in his own home by his wife (Nancy Travis) and three daughters with no one but his infant grandson Boyd to turn to. At times, he finds allies in the form of his hard ass boss Ed (Hector Elizondo) and his daughter’s boyfriend Kyle.
Gorilla grunts have been traded in for complaints about millennial hipsterism. Baxter is sort of a less offensive Archie Bunker-esque character, unabashedly unapologetic with his conservative views yet twist his arm enough and he might try to see everything from the millennial hipster’s point of view.
An episode in the first season sums up the character. When his company’s baseball team is forced to go co-ed (let females play), Mike is torn between his belief that men should be allowed to have their own time when they can grunt, snort, burp, drink beer and tell dirty jokes without worrying about offending women.
Co-ed sports are lose-lose for men as Baxter explains that if a man beats a woman at baseball he’s considered a bully, but if he loses to a woman he’s considered an embarrassment.
On the other hand, as a father of three girls, he dislikes the idea that someone might tell his daughters they can’t do something. Ultimately, he recruits his most tomboyish daughter for a spot on the team and she crushes all the dudes.
Mike, who rants regularly on in videos on his store’s website, sums up a feeling that a lot of men think but few are willing to say out loud, “I want a world where women can do everything a man can do…and just don’t want to.”
Tim Taylor has grown up and morphed into Mike and Mike, like many of us modern men, suffer from an identity crisis. Women have no idea what they want us to be anymore and we’re just as equally clueless.
But one thing’s for sure – we men need crossbows, and beer, and hunting equipment, and on occasion, the ability to burp and drink beer and tell obscene jokes without being judged by the women folk.
We’re just too evolved now to tell the womenfolk that they can’t join in on the outdoor crossbow hunting trips, but they’d better start burping and drinking beer and telling obscene jokes if they want to keep up.
File under – “Women Have the Right to Act Like Men Now…But Why Would They Want To?”
STATUS: Shelf-worthy. Available on Netflix. Good show for when you need something not too complicated to watch for twenty minutes before you fall asleep.
Season 11 just dropped on Netflix and Season 12 is underway on FXX.
Twelve seasons for a comedy show. That’s got to be a record. I feel like I just started watching this show yesterday. In a way, I feel like I grew up with these guys a bit. I’m about their age, give or take a year or two. And I guess we were all adults when it started but still, how time flies.
In Season 11, the gang parodies 1980s ski slope movies (a genre that sadly, or perhaps thankfully, lived and died by the end of that decade). They catch a leprechaun, accidentally kidnap people with a St. Patrick’s Day themed party bus, litigate the trial of the century against the disturbingly inbred McPoyle clan and go to hell after being trapped inside a cruise ship’s boat jail.
They can keep making this show forever as far as I’m concerned. Dennis, Dee, Charlie and Mac are the biggest group of scumbag scammers around and they will no doubt keep failing at their attempts to make a quick, dishonest buck so they might as well keep those seasons coming.
It’s been a year since I began this list but I always knew I’d get back to it sooner or later.
Dexter. It raised us up so high only to bring us crashing so far down.
Needless to say, we’re talking about how the series ended, so if you haven’t watched it yet, beware of SPOILERS.
In a world of sequels to sequels and reboots of reboots, Showtime’s Dexter had a rather unique premise: a serial killer who you could actually root for.
Michael C. Hall starred as Dexter Morgan, the Miami Homicide forensic analyst who, in his spare time, feeds his twisted inner need to kill (which he refers to as his “dark passenger”) by murdering bad people.
The series starts off strong. Seasons 1 and 2 are particularly great. Season 4 Dexter meets his match in the Trinity Killer (John Lithgow) and then after that, the whole shebang just begins to unravel.
At the heart of the show was the fact that Dexter, believe it or not, was relatable. Sure, you don’t kidnap evildoers, take them to a secluded area, wrap them in plastic wrap and then stab them, but at some point in your life, maybe you’ve felt like you don’t fit in.
Dexter suffers from that same anxiety. He has a hard time making friends. He has a hard time sharing his feelings because he doesn’t have any, yet he’d like to have some. He brings a box of donuts to work everyday to use as a social crutch/ice breaker (i.e. he can’t really strike up a conversation with someone without the excuse of, ‘Hey, would you like a donut?'”)
We’ve all been there and yet, we all (hopefully) see improvement in our social circles as long as we keep trying. Over the course of the show, the Miami Homicide Division becomes Dexter’s family. The various detectives become his brothers and sisters. Hell, one of them even is his sister in the form of foul mouthed Debra (Jennifer Carpenter).
Throughout the series, we see the toll Dexter’s double life takes on him. His job is to help the police department uphold the law. Yet all too often, he uses department resources (databases, crime lab, etc.) to track down bad guys and kill them before his colleagues can collar them.
Moral issues arise. Is it right to do something evil, even if it is against someone evil? Is it wrong to be a vigilante? Doesn’t allegiance to the legal system mean that we take the good with the bad, that sometimes a bad guy gets off on a technicality in order to make sure good people aren’t railroaded?
In the beginning of the series, Dexter operates with a moral code (passed down to him by his police officer father) that serves him well. Be thorough and don’t make a mistake (i.e. don’t kill someone who didn’t do something wrong). Don’t share this secret life with others. Don’t get caught.
In the first two seasons, Dexter’s murderous craft is an art form to behold. He uses intelligence, trickery, deception, science and skill to catch his victims, kill them and make them disappear without leaving behind so much as a single trace.
Alas, in season three the writing starts to get sloppy and Dexter begins going from methodical mad man who thinks of everything to guy who wants to be everyone’s friend. Dexter shares his secret with a district attorney played by Jimmy Smitts, and from thereon, starts sharing his double life with others throughout the series.
That seemed dumb to me. I remember thinking, “Yeah right. No one can keep a secret like that for long.” The whole point of why this character was interesting is because he does so much evil in his personal life and yet still manages to show up to work everyday and beguile a group of colleagues who treat him like a member of the family, fool his sister, his girlfriend, even the step-kids that he takes on as a step-father figure.
Every TV show raises a question. Here, the question is, “Will Dexter ever get caught?”
That’s the question that kept us on the edge of our seats, season after season. Will Dexter slip up and be discovered? Will the people he works with in Miami Homicide end up looking like and feeling like fools when it comes out that one of their own was a murderer? Will one of the detectives end up taking Dexter in? Will Debra and Dexter square off?
Alas, the show jumps the shark when Debra discover Dexter’s secret life. Despite her character being presented as a strong law woman, she goes nuts, quits the force and starts helping Dexter cover up his shit. Just never seemed like something she would ever do.
Personally, I was waiting for years for that moment when Debra makes a difficult choice to haul her own brother in but I never got it.
The show sort of redeems itself when Deb, faced with the decision of whether or not to back up Detective LaGuerta (Lauren Luna Velez) or side with her brother, chooses her brother and shoots LaGuerta. Not really an outcome I was rooting for but OK, I get it. Family bonds are strong and sometimes people do shitty things they don’t want to do in the name of saving a family member’s hide.
To me, the obvious storyline would have been for Sgt. Angel Bautista (David Zayas) to end up in some kind of showdown vs. Dexter and Deb. Bautista and LaGuerta were married and though divorced, he still loved her. He looked at Dexter and Deb as his own brother and sister, even including Dexter in on his bowling league. Surely he could have discovered this and felt betrayed and there could have been some awesome final season long manhunt where he tracks him down but no…nope…Bautista just remains a clueless dummy to the end.
Where was I?
Right. The finale sucked not just because it sucked because it was just one long arc of suck that began in season five and culminated in the disastrous finale.
Deb dies off screen. We don’t see it. We’re just told it as a side note, as if it is an afterthought.
Dexter motors his boat to the hospital and pulls up to a ramp and you’re supposed to just nod like an asshole and be like, “OK. I guess hospitals have boat ramps.”
Dexter then picks his dead sister up out of her hospital bed and walks out the front door with her, past nurses and doctors and security and yeah, I get that they were all dealing with the complications of a hurricane but still, someone would have noticed this.
Dexter then leaves with Debra, again from the hospital boat ramp, and deposits her in a watery grave in a part of the bay where he dumped all of his chopped up victims.
For a brief second you think this is interesting symbolism. Dexter feels like shit that his double life caused his sister so much pain that it essentially killed her so he dispatches her as if she’s one last victim.
But then you just end up thinking that Dexter is a sack of shit and maybe his sister deserved a nice police department funeral with the flag draped over the casket and the twenty one gun salute and a head stone for people to put flowers on but no, he drops her carcass off in a part of the ocean filled with chopped up bodies.
Dexter, you asshole.
Oh, so then Dexter leaves his young son to be raised by Hannah McKay (Yvonne Strahovski), a murderous wench that he hasn’t even known for that long.
I always felt the writers missed out a potentially awesome story line. There really should have been a season where Dexter and Hannah get married, go to jobs by day, then serially kill together at night. Showtime really should have hired me.
So then Dexter points his boat at the hurricane and sails towards it. And you’re like, “OK…well this is all shit but at least there’s a resolution. There’s an answer. Dexter finally feels like such a shit heel for his life of crime that he kills himself.”
But nope. The writers wouldn’t commit. In one last brief scene, Dexter has taken a job in the great Northwest as a lumberjack.
So that’s pretty much it. We watched this show for years only to find out that he becomes a chopper of wood in the end.
Truly, one of the worst TV show finales ever.
If you haven’t seen it yet, you shouldn’t have read any of this. But at any rate, seasons one through four are great and then it probably should have just stopped at four if the writers weren’t going to take it seriously.
That showdown where Dexter’s friends/family finally take him down…or that big final case where Dexter beats all the odds and walks away a free man one last time never materializes. It just fizzles out and then leaves you with a promise that one day a show might be developed about a murderous lumberjack that, let’s face it, you won’t really want to see.
This sad pop culture news just in. Alan Thicke, the actor who played Jason Seaver on Growing Pains, has died at age 69. He was one of the great 1980s sitcom ads and I feel like I hear his fix your tax problem commercials every five minutes on the radio.
I blame the Yeti. That furry douche never lets me do anything.
If you’ve seen beyond this episode, I’d appreciate it if you don’t spoil anything. If you haven’t seen up to this episode, look away as things will be spoiled for you.
So this was an episode for Tara’s character to really shine. That’s done from time to time, where a bit player is given their own episode and we learn more about him/her.
Here, we learn that Tara relies on a good sense of humor.
She’s taken captive by a group of females. I was hoping there would be an awesome backstory to this. Maybe they’re a bunch of man hating Amazon lesbian warriors who take advantage of the zompoc to create their own lesbian warrior enclave but alas, no, that’s not the case at all.
What was here friend’s name? The guy with the dreads? P? Pete? I don’t know. Notice that zombie we are led to think might be him was wearing a dress though and there are some tracks next to his broken glasses.
So either What’s-his-name was zombified and then someone came along and put a dress on his zombified body or more likely, a woman who looks like him was zombified and he was able to escape.
We’ll find out.
There’s a part where Tara could be all about herself but she thinks of the greater good and of those who helped her so…that’s nice. Moments like that don’t happen often.
Bookshelf Battle 