I had heard good things about iZombie a few months ago and decided to give it a look. It was only then that I realized that Rob Thomas, who was behind Veronica Mars and Party Down, was one of the show's co-creators.
iZombie is based on a comic book of the same name, though it apparently takes great liberties with the source material. As someone exposed to the show first, I'm willing to let it exist as its own thing.
The premise is this: Promising medical resident Olivia "Liv" Moore (yes, it's a kind of dumb pun) has her life perfectly on track, with a promising career, good friendships, and a pretty ideal fiancé, with the again, improbable name of Major Lilywhite (the names on the show are kind of ridiculous, but you get used to it.) Deciding to finally unwind, she accepts an invitation to a boat party, which is unfortunately where an outbreak of zombies goes off and she gets scratched by a zombie drug dealer named Blaine.
Now, zombies work very differently than your Romero-rules version. Liv finds that she has a powerful need to consume human brains, but doing so maintains her human mind, preventing her from becoming a ravenous fiend. Her hair goes white, as does her skin. When she eats a person's brain, she starts to adopt some of the person's personality traits and can get flashes of memories from the days before the person died. Also, they're nearly-indestructible (as always, the brain is the weak-spot) and they can go "full-zombie," which gives them super-strength and makes their eyes go red.
Liv gets a job working at the morgue as a Medical Examiner so that she has a fresh supply of brains, conveniently avoiding the need to rob graves or, of course, kill people.
But zombieism mostly ruins her life. She's afraid of giving the condition to Major, so she breaks off the engagement and loses a lot of motivation in life.
However, she gains that motivation when she realizes that she can use her brain-eating powers to, that's right, solve crimes! She helps out a detective who just joined Seattle PD's homicide division named Clive Babineaux, who she explains her visions to as being the result of her being a psychic, which... is almost true.
There's also Ravi Chakrabarti, the senior ME and her boss, who figures out what her condition is when he sees her eating brains but, refreshingly, immediately becomes her ally in trying to cure her of the condition and get to the bottom of what caused the outbreak in the first place.
Finally, Blaine (no last name given) is the main-cast villain character, who basically tries to turn his zombie status into the basis of a pyramid scheme to make money off other zombies desperate for brains.
Still with me?
The show feels very similar in tone to Veronica Mars, complete with charming blonde (though to be fair, the blondeness in this case is caused by zombieism) female protagonist who maintains a mostly friendly relationship with her ex and narrates every episode through Voice Over. Both shows have a mostly-light and humourous take on their premises but occasionally goes into very dark and disturbing places. And of course both come at the crime procedural format from a very unusual angle.
Veronica Mars was clearly heavily influenced by Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In a sense, iZombie is the Angel to Veronica Mars' Buffy. The Buffy spin-off extracted the premise of the original show from its "High School is Hell" setting an made it more about fighting against the ugly truths of adulthood. iZombie has no High School portion - its characters are fully adult by the time the show starts, now dealing with some of the frustrations of adulthood, like the potential for aimlessness and the shocking cruelty the world is capable of inflicting on people.
The show has a great cast, and Rose McIver makes for a very fun person to watch episode to episode. Sometimes the show's procedural and episodic format can skew a little cheesy, but the show employs the trick of usually teasing out the master arc-plot at least a bit with each episode to keep us whatever-the-opposite-of-ADD-is havers interested.
It remains to be seen if the show will truly do anything really ground-breaking, but it's a show that's solid on fundamentals and also fits that weird niche for me of doing something unusual with old monster tropes to make the monsters more sympathetic.
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