Santa Clarita Diet is the latest instalment in the well-worn history of comedy-horror. From the dark-hearted 1994 film Serial Mom to the more recent pastel-pink TV series Scream Queens, Hollywood has long since cottoned on to the seductive pull of something sinister – even murderous – wrapped up in a pretty bow and packaged for humour.

In this sense, Netflix’s latest original series may at first seem as though it has little to add to a somewhat niche genre which has already been so thoroughly mastered. Even in the context of TV as a whole, many parts of the show are far from original: the acerbic wit of the teenage daughter; the nerdy boy next door who turns hero; and the gossiping suburban mums.

But despite all this, Santa Clarita Diet somehow finds a way to do something fresh. The concept of taking classic comedy tropes and subverting them with some good old-fashioned gore is hardly revolutionary in itself, but the show finds a new take.

Santa Clarita Diet tells the story of an oh-so-suburban woman – complete with husband, kid, and boxy car – who somehow becomes undead (we don’t find out how in series 1), and acquires an overwhelming hunger for human flesh. It is basically Desperate Housewives if the housewives also sometimes murdered people and ate them. It’s great fun.

“Never has a show about flesh-eating zombies seemed so frivolous and upbeat”

The key to a good comedy-horror is lightness of touch, and this show manages to be lighter than most others I’ve seen. Graphic scenes showing main character Sheila (Drew Barrymore) with her jaw buried deep inside a man’s entrails are set aside those in which we see her absentmindedly picking her teeth with a dead person’s finger or ravenously eating a live snail plucked from the garden (the crunching sounds make it). And all of this is interwoven seamlessly with the more banal moments of married life – Why does this box have no lid? (Never mind the fact the box is being used to hide human remains) – as well as the more existential process of coming to terms with a life which may never be the same again. Never has a show about flesh-eating zombies seemed so frivolous and upbeat.

Barrymore and Tim Olyphant (who plays Joel, Sheila’s husband) get the tone just right: the comedy feels natural throughout, despite the preponderance of blood. Barrymore, in particular, is excellent. Her acting could easily seem wooden in another show, but here – in this camped-up suburban farce – it works. Her somewhat laboured style is like a neon sign flashing COMEDY!, which provides the perfect foil to the gore.

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Despite an anticlimactic final episode, which doesn’t quite wrap things up or leave you desperate for more, Santa Clarita Diet is immensely watchable. It is the first show in a long time where I have had to fight every instinct to sit and binge the whole thing. I laughed throughout and would recommend it to all non-squeamish lovers of TV. This show is the fresh take on an old genre we didn’t know we needed