'Santa Clarita Diet' creator's complaint about Netflix seems petty

Some shows get canceled. Life happens. Even the ones we love. Just look at the brilliance that was Northern Exposure, which has only recently been available via streaming. It was a quirky series that surprisingly never got made. It would be better if released now than it was in the 1990s.

But Santa Clarita Diet? It was a bit ahead of its time. Sort of. Zombie comedies work mostly when they are films instead of series. The show starred Drew Barrymore and she is great in nearly anything, and she was good in this Netflix show, too. But just because Barrymore has a cult following and the series had a cult following does not mean Netflix was going to keep it on.

Look, as great as Tom Waits is as a musician and artist, record companies are not going to pay him a higher amount than lesser artists like Nickelback to stay on their dime. Companies want to make money, and, for the most part, the general public is less off.

Santa Clarita Diet creator still ticked how the series was canceled by Netflix

Such was the case with Santa Clarita Diet, a show about a real estate agent (Barrymore) who was also a zombie. It is a simple premise and one that makes sense. If the program had been a movie then great. Trying to stretch that storyline over seasons is a reach. Netflix checked its bottom line, which it has a right to do, and decided not to waste more money.

The issue is that recently, five (now six) years after the show ended, series creator Victor Fresco has given an interview implying he feels a bit backstabbed by Netflix for how they canceled the series. Fresco claims he learned the show was ending from an assistant after the sets were being dismantled. He claims no one from Netflix ever let him know the show was over.

Like the plot of the show, it seems a stretch that Fresco would not have been told Santa Clarita Diet was over by anyone else but by an assistant, but who are we to judge? Barrymore was great in the series, but the show was unlikely to ever grab the attention of a larger audience. Business is business.

Fresco told The Guardian, "That’s how I heard it was definitively not coming back. We had an inkling it might not come into a fourth year. We didn’t want to make it easier for them to cancel us. We thought ‘Why are we doing their work for them?...You really have, at best, a three-year run" unless the show is a "monster hit."

Yeah, that's how television and streaming works. Your show doesn't get a huge audience, it likely is not going to last for lots of years. That doesn't mean fans are not going to miss the series, but studios also owe it to shareholders to make a profit.

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