What’s the name of the show? iZombie
Is it made by Apple? No, that’s just a strange affection that’s supposed to make it seem more modern or something.
When does it premiere? Tuesday 17 March at 9pm EST on the CW.
What is this show? Liv (Rose McIver), a former med student, is turned into a zombie after a disastrous boat party (aren’t all boat parties disastrous?). When she wakes up, she gets a job in the morgue so she can eat cadavers’ brains, but in doing so she gets flashes of their lives and some of their skills and personality traits. This leads to a side gig where she helps the police solve murders.
So this is like Medium but with an appetite? Exactly. Speaking of which, do you think when Patricia Arquette was playing that medium she already had a vision that she’d win an Oscar one day?
If she’s a zombie, does she just like shuffle around and mumble and try to eat people? No, she can walk, talk and reason. She basically lives like a normal person except she’s very pale, has a bad dye job and likes to eat brains. Oh, and she can go “full zombie mode” when she loses her mind. Her eyes turn red and she gets super powerful.
What’s the show’s pedigree? It is based on a now-defunct comic book of the same name by Chris Robertson and Michael Allred. Veronica Mars creators Rob Thomas and Diane Ruggiero-Wright wrote the pilot, which Thomas directed.
What happens in the premiere? Liv gets turned into a zombie and the former type-A med student gets super depressed, leaves her prestigious program for a job in the morgue, dumps her fiance and doesn’t want to hang out with her family or friends any more. However, she makes an ally in her boss, Ravi (Rahul Kohli), who figures out she’s a zombie and wants to do experiments on her. When the body of a Jane Doe turns up in the morgue, Liv feasts on her brain and through ingesting it finds out some things about her. She blurts out the facts when desperate homicide detective Babineaux (Malcolm Goodwin) is in the morgue. Ravi convinces him Liv is a psychic, and she helpsBabineaux solve the woman’s death using her new special zombie brain-eating powers.
Is this show any good? I was a big fan of the iZombie comic book, which is considerably different from the show. In the book Liv is a gravedigger whose best friends are a ghost who was a teen in the 1960s and a “wereterrier”, which is like a werewolf, but he turns into a Scottish terrier. They were like a ragtag group of supernatural Scoobies that would help the dead people whose brains Liv ate find closure. Then it forgot all about those cases and delved into the mythology of how these different creatures came to be and what their purpose was. Finally, it got into all this wacky stuff about how they had to save the world from a tentacle monster. It was way better once it got to that place.
The show is the same. It’s not like the CW – the home of The Vampire Diaries and Supernatural – to skimp on the supernatural stuff. iZombie feels like it’s holding back a little bit. Sure, this isn’t a straight-up detective show, but Liv’s condition and the magical elements surrounding it are given the short shrift when they are precisely what makes this show different. Instead, iZombie comes across like Law & Order: ZVU. Unfortunately, the cases in the first episodes aren’t that interesting. They’re easy to solve and about characters we have little connection with. It’s as if they’re marking time until we know Liv well enough to get to the real mystery.
Things pick up considerably with the introduction of Blaine (David Anders), another zombie who turns up in the second episode. Why is Liv seeing visions of him, and why are so many people suddenly popping up as zombies? I have a feeling, just like the comic book, that the show will start to care less about the cases and more about Liv and the reason she woke up in a body bag after that boat party. At least I hope so, because television doesn’t need another procedural – not even one with the wit and dexterity this show displays.
Which characters will you love? Liv is actually a great character, a woman who wants to change her life after a traumatic experience but isn’t quite sure what her new reality entails. We can all relate to her, and I have a feeling we’ll learn to love her even more as things get weirder.
Which characters will you hate? Her ex-finace’s name is Major (Robert Buckley). Major.
What’s the best thing about it? There is a fair amount of levity in this show and, since it’s on the CW, it doesn’t take itself too seriously. Liv getting to play out the personality of a new victim each week keeps the show nice and fresh.
What’s the worst thing about it? Though the show bears little resemblance to the comic book, it still does this thing when coming in and out of the acts where it makes the image look like a panel from the comic book. It’s a trick the old Batman and Wonder Woman shows used to use, but unless people know this show is based on a comic (which most won’t), it’s an odd affectation without context.
Should you watch this show? I say wait until the first season is over to see if things get more magical, both literally and figuratively.
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