Santa Clarita Diet creator learned his show was canceled when Netflix took apart its sets
Victor Fresco said he ended season 3 on a cliffhanger because "we didn’t want to make it easier for them to cancel us."
Photo: Saeed Adyani/NetflixBack in Santa Clarita Diet‘s day, Netflix was infamous for canceling its shows after three seasons. (GLOW and Locke & Key were also victims of this practice.) That many installments may seem like a luxury now—most shows these days only get one—but zom-com creator Victor Fresco was still “blindsided” by the loss. In a new interview with The Guardian, he shared that he was in the edit suite for season three when his assistant producer walked in to tell him the sets were being dismantled as they spoke. “That’s how I heard it was definitively not coming back,” he recalled.
Despite this jarring revelation, Fresco had previously tried to pull one over on the streamer. “We had an inkling it might not come into a fourth year,” he said. Santa Clarita Diet (a show this writer was equally sad to lose) followed a normal suburban family (Drew Barrymore, Timothy Olyphant, and Liv Hewson) with a secret: Barrymore’s character was actually an undead zombie with a taste for human flesh.
Season three—the show’s last—ended on a cliffhanger. Olyphant’s character, Joel, also became a zombie. Surprise! We never got to see the aftermath of his transformation, however, because the bloody sets were taken down and the show was abandoned. “We didn’t want to make it easier for them to cancel us,” Fresco said of the choice to leave the story unresolved. “We thought ‘Why are we doing their work for them?'” In the end, it didn’t matter.
Fresco clearly had some simmering resentment toward the streamer back in 2019 when this all went down, though he tried to play nice at the time. “Netflix took a chance on this odd show and for that we will always be grateful. They were supportive, ever positive, and appreciative of our work. Until about noon today. Still, they were just one phone call away from being a perfect studio. Not bad. Everything ends,” he wrote in a statement at the time, per The Hollywood Reporter.
Now, the mask is off. “You really have, at best, a three-year run” unless your show is a “monster hit” like Stranger Things, he told The Guardian. According to Fresco, this is largely due to the system of annually-increasing bonuses that Netflix includes in most contracts. “If you look closely at your deal, you’ll see that there’s a huge disincentive for them to order seasons four and five,” he explained. “Because they’re really making a big payout then.”