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The Chosen Adventures
The Chosen Adventures is not Scripture. But for those who don’t mind a little talking sheep with a lot of strong life lessons, this show might be a nice fit for your family.
Sheila, like many women, wears a lot of hats. She’s a wife. A mother. A realtor. A zombie. A friend. A—
What’s that? Did I say zombie? Why, yes. Yes I did. Sheila, unlike most women we likely know, is dead. And like most zombies, she has a taste for living flesh. Awkward, that. And while she has yet to eye her husband and teen daughter the way Yosemite Sam might eye Daffy Duck after some time on a desert island, you just never know. Zombies aren’t exactly known for their culinary restraint.
Even if husband Joel and daughter Abby stay off the menu, though, Sheila’s eating habits certainly promise to make for some interesting Thanksgiving dinners.
Sheila wasn’t always a zombie. She was once just a dutiful wife, a mom, a realtor living in suburban California wondering whether she might be just too restrained.
“I wish I was bold,” she says. “Am I bold? No, I’m not. I’d like to be 20 percent bolder. No, 80 percent. No …”
But then she dies in a spectacular explosion of vomit, and everything changes. She buys a Range Rover. (“I’ve been wanting one since this morning!” she confesses to a friend.) She wants to have sex with her husband several times a day. Oh, and yes, she enjoys eating people. Particularly unlikeable ones.
Joel does his best to cope with his wife’s new condition. But let’s face it: Having a zombie for a spouse would be a challenge for any marriage. And, naturally, they also must grapple with the morality of keeping Sheila suitably fed—perhaps best summed up by the title of Episode 2: “We Can’t Kill People!”
‘Course, Episode 3 is titled: “We Can Kill People!” which suggests just how much time they spent wrestling with that little ethical quandary. It’s not long before Sheila masters the art of making human smoothies, growing more toned and fit as she restricts her diet to free-range hominids. And indeed, talk with Sheila, and she’ll say that she’s really come alive since she’s been dead—no longer a slave to her former insecurities and hang-ups. Her id’s in control now. And except for her messy eating habits, Sheila thinks that she’s doing just fine, thanks.
The police may have other ideas. The ones that aren’t devoured on the spot, of course.
“I don’t want to be in dark s—, and I don’t want to put dark s— out there,” star Drew Barrymore told The Daily Beast in February 2017, shortly after Santa Clarita Diet was released on Netflix. “I hate negativity. I want to be optimistic, problem solving, and solution oriented.”
And that, I suppose, says something about our 21st-century entertainment culture: that a zombie devouring her victims alive and on-camera can be considered light, optimistic, solution-oriented entertainment.
In fairness, Barrymore’s not all wrong about the show’s vibe. For all its liberal use of blood and gore and vomit and bile, Santa Clarita Diet is indeed a comedy—one that places its severed tongue firmly in cheek. The undead conceit allows the show a certain metaphorical license to critique suburban culture, femininity and the push-pull between doing what we want to do and doing what we know we should do. We even see some very twisted old-fashioned values along the way.
Take Sheila and Joel’s marriage, for instance. In an age when people seemingly get divorced because one partner won’t pick up his or her socks, Joel and Sheila seem determined to do their wedding vows one better: “‘Til death do us part” … and then some. When Joel discovers Sheila devouring her first freshly dead victim, an embarrassed Sheila lifts her head from the gory corpse and tells Joel, “I really want to make this work …”
“It’s nice to see people excel as a couple,” the recently-divorced Barrymore told The Daily Beast. “I’m so sick of everyone … failing, fighting and falling apart.”
Still, none of that cheery commentary mitigates the fact that Santa Clarita Diet is terrifically, repugnantly and unrepentantly disgusting. Blood spurts. Entrails spill. People are killed in horrible, horrible ways, and the show’s protagonist does most of the killing. And while the sexual content isn’t nearly as graphic, there’s still plenty of it to wade through, from disturbingly creepy come-ons to allusions to infidelity, masturbation and rape. (To say nothing of Sheila’s seemingly insatiable desire for different varieties of sex.) Oh, yes, and the language is abysmal, too.
Netflix’s Santa Clarita Diet is both witty and wicked. It’s as graphic as The Walking Dead, perhaps even more so. But its makers, instead of wanting its viewers to wince and gasp, encourages us to laugh.
I’m not sure if that’s an improvement.
After breaking into someone’s house on an unsuccessful search for special bile meant to help prevent Sheila’s murderous streaks, Joel is sent to an insane asylum where he bonds with a man whose wife recently died. He’s quickly released once the staff realizes that Joel is not insane. Sheila is being kept in the basement, chained to a pole, so that she won’t kill people. Sheila’s daughter Abby and Eric (the teenage next-door neighbor) post a message online looking for vomit for Sheila when Joel doesn’t come through. Eric bonds with Ramona (a store clerk) over the phone when she calls him to ask if he has a girlfriend.
Five F-bombs are dropped. The C-word is used once. “S—” is uttered three times and “a–,” “d—” and “d–k” are all used once. There is a ton of sexual innuendo, including references to sadomasochism and sex. Characters make out. Someone offers to sell the vagina of a corpse. Another character graphically pops their thumbs out of place. Characters search for vomit, and blood and intestines are seen in excess. Other characters eat the body parts of their victims (like thumbs, livers and kidneys).
As she and her husband show a property to a prospective buyer, Sheila grows seriously ill and sequesters herself in a bathroom. Joel discovers her unconscious and fears that she’s died, but she comes to and asks if they got a contract on the house. (They didn’t.) Good news, yes? Yes—other than the fact that Joel can’t find a heartbeat in his wife anymore.
Sheila’s “death” scene is pretty gross. She throws up a couple of gallons of green goo on the master bedroom carpet, and when Joel walks in on her in the bathroom, the entire room is coated in vomit, with what could be an internal organ lying beside her.
Sheila eats raw hamburger and pops a live snail into her mouth. (“Crunchy,” she quips.) When they’re alone, two scenes strongly suggest oral sex (though it’s not shown). She later confesses, in the presence of her daughter, that the two are having “spectacular sex.” She goes out drinking with her female friends, dancing sultrily with them on the dance floor. When Joel tries to take her home, she refuses to go—her refusal backed up by a handsome, pushy fellow real estate agent who clearly has designs on bedding Sheila.
Sheila doesn’t come home that night. But she doesn’t have sex with the other man she’s met. (We know because she reminds him the next morning that she refused his come-ons.) The man grabs then Sheila, presses her against him and threatens to tell Joel that they had sex (four times in his car) unless she agrees to sleep with him. She pretends to be turned on and begins sucking two of his fingers—before biting them off. Sheila chews the appendages as blood spurts, then begins eating the rest of him. Joel discovers Sheila, her maw covered in blood, chomping on the real estate agent’s midsection, intestines lying nearby.
We hear verbal allusions to masturbation, sex and infidelity. Characters drink wine and beer. Joel secretly smokes marijuana. We hear about half a dozen uses each of the f- and s-words. Oher vulgarities include “d–n,” “h—,” “p-ss” and “d–k.” God’s name is misused about a dozen times, twice with the word “d–n.”
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
Kristin Smith joined the Plugged In team in 2017. Formerly a Spanish and English teacher, Kristin loves reading literature and eating authentic Mexican tacos. She and her husband, Eddy, love raising their children Judah and Selah. Kristin also has a deep affection for coffee, music, her dog (Cali) and cat (Aslan).
The Chosen Adventures is not Scripture. But for those who don’t mind a little talking sheep with a lot of strong life lessons, this show might be a nice fit for your family.
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