YMMV / Santa Clarita Diet

• Audience-Alienating Premise: The show is a sitcom with heavy focus on family, but there's also a lot of gore. A number of people were turned off by this.
• Awesome Music: Serena Ryder's "Got Your Number" in the third episode, as Abby smokebombs her friend's ex-boyfriend's house.
• Catharsis Factor: Having how much of a psychopath he'd been all of Season 3, seeing Poplović get killed with the crossbow certainly fits this.
• Complete Monster: Dobrivoje Poplović, the Big Bad of season 3, is a sadistic Serbian who has an obsession with the undead. He frequently has had undead people abducted and attempted to experiment on them while they're alive—and possibly has mistakenly abducted regular humans that he's tortured anyway. Until Poplović gets a lead in Santa Clarita, at least two undead break free and kill themselves to avoid being dissected. Poplović cares nothing for having incompetent employees murdered or threatened, threatening one of his new men by suffocation with a plastic bag, driving two to eventually quit due to being abused continuously. Believing Joel Hammond to be the undead he's looking for, Poplović threatens to kill everyone at his and wife Sheila's party if he doesn't go with him. Poplović then impales Sheila to a wall when discovering she's the true undead, stating his intention to kill Joel and use her and other undead people to harvest their blood for a cure to aging that he can profit from.
• Diagnosed by the Audience:
  • Aside from having an IQ of 172, Dr. Cora Wolf appears to have minor mood swings, lacks some social skills (she appears to not even understand how to hug someone properly), prefers to use words like "act of passion" instead of "sex", cannot understand sarcasm, and has no trouble piercing a woman's neck with a pen when there are other people watching.
  • Ramona admits herself that she's "not very good at reading social cues".
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Gary, for being played by Nathan Fillion, and for being an endlessly snarky severed head.
• Fandom Rivalry: Fans of iZombie have taken some issue with the show for the many similarities. It's less out of hate for the show, but moreso because of a review from Esquire which praised the show for supposedly doing things that iZombie did first, and the hate is more directed at that more than anything. iZombie's showrunner Rob Thomas and castmember Rahul Kholi have joined in on calling Esquire out, the latter finding the article insulting to the series' star Rose McIver.
• Nightmare Fuel: The end of Season 3 is truly unsettling even beyond the show’s usual level without a single joke to lighten things up. Sheila’s spider ball crawls into Joel’s ear, and after convulsing a bit he gives a high-pitched “Mama” like she’d been trying to get it to say all season. After a regretful kiss that it’s come to this, Sheila bites Joel so he can live as a zombie, but right after he wakes up the season ends with our still having no idea if it’s really him or the ball. And now we'll never know.
• One-Scene Wonder: Gerald McRaney as a possible zombie who's well aware of how creepy he can sound. It also helps that the scene is the closest Deadwood fans will get to seeing a proper confrontation between Bullock and Hearst.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Fans of Never Have I Ever will recognize Ramona Young as the grocery store employee.
  • One of Abby and Eric's classmates, Sarah, is played by Kaylee Bryant two years before she began staring as Josie Saltzman on Legacies.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: Any person on this show who is a decent human being will be completely and utterly ineffectual. It can be actively draining to a viewer who the jokes aren't landing for.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: It takes a while for viewers to sympathize with Abby. The issue is that between late season one and late season two, she ignores her own Jerkass Realization and continues to act high-and-mighty and cold towards her parents, mostly ignoring their issues and blaming their rocky relationship solely on them, despite that they are trying their best to make the best of a bad situation while she makes no effort to communicate or better their relationship, making no effort to meet them in the middle while expecting them to meet her where she stands. Even her parents eventually agree that one of the reasons they don't inform her of so much stuff is how judgemental she is. She does gets better a few moments.
  • Taken to an unfortunate whole new level in season two where Abby wants to commit actual arson to prove a point to a bad company and is somehow self-righteously angry that Eric doesn't agree with her and want to engage in a crime that will send them both to jail for the sake of being environmentalists. It's even more unlikable considering how Eric has gone out of his way to help her and her family get away with literal murder and she acts like he's somehow betraying her by not going along with the arson plan. Keep in mind, said arson is going to be committed with explosives she stole from the lying, recently deceased Dirty Cop Dan.
  • She has another Jerkass Realization in season three that seems to finally stick after the FBI investigate the fracking explosion and tie Eric to the scene because of his connection to Dan's C4, with Abby realizing that her impulsive decisions could lead to him being put in prison, and she has a tear-filled breakdown. She spends the rest of the season doing everything in her power to try and throw suspicion off him.

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