Brains, Murder, and Romance: The Legacy of iZombie

Zombies are eternal. You never really know when the undead will have their cultural moment, but they had a good one on television in the 2010s, with AMC’s The Walking Dead (2010–2022) and Netflix’s horror-comedy oddity The Santa Clarita Diet (2017–2018). Tucked in between was iZombie, a show with a healthy balance of crime-solving procedural, undead soap opera, and absurdist comedy that ran for five seasons on The CW.

The network series never quite found blockbuster status, but it gathered up a devoted following along the way, thanks to its sharp and often heartfelt writing, sincere performances, and genuinely fresh take on the zombie formula. Creator Rob Thomas partnered with Diane Ruggiero-Wright to adapt iZombie loosely from the Vertigo comic series of the same name, by Chris Roberson and Michael Allred. The changes to the source material were significant, but the essence of the undead protagonist remained the same.

In the original comic series, zombie Gwen Dylan works as a gravedigger in Eugene, Oregon. She needs to eat human brains every 30 days or else her memories begin to fade. She is also followed by a ghost and a were-terrier, who are more friends than bodyguards, allowing for an alternative supernatural take on the theme of friendship and self-identity. The show, however, took a very different approach. Set in Seattle, it followed Liv Moore—no, that’s not a typo—as a type-A medical student who only has to eat human brains once a week to stay in control of her new life as one of the undead.

Played with sharp precision by Rose McIver, Liv is zombified after attending an ill-advised boat party during which the designer drug Utopium—mixed with an energy drink called Max Rager—turns into a zombie outbreak. Scratched and left for dead in a body bag, Liv awakens as an undead member of the walking dead. Breaking off her engagement with Major (Robert Buckley), her human fiancé, she kicks out Peyton (Aly Michalka), her sad-sack med-school roommate and platonic life partner, and lands a job as an intern at the medical examiner’s office to get easy access to the brains she will need to survive. That’s when Ravi (Rahul Kohli) steps in.

Liv’s neurotic yet kind-hearted boss at the morgue, Ravi, is also a former CDC scientist working on developing a cure for the zombie virus. He is the one who quickly figures out Liv is one of the undead and keeps her secret while she bumbles along working through one identity crisis after another, thanks to the brains she eats.

The very first rule of being a zombie, Liv learns, is that if she eats the brains of other humans, she will assume some of that person’s personality, memories, and general life story. This results in a rotating slate of characters that allows McIver to flex her comedic muscles. Be it playing a sassy dominatrix, an old coot, a romance novelist, a magician, a man in a porn show, or a pub trivia nerd turned hitman, Liv embodied each with sincerity, sincerity, and more sincerity.

These brains also served to help Liv solve the murders the victims committed before they were killed, thus teaming her with Det. Clive Babineaux (Malcolm Goodwin), who, at least in the early going, firmly believed Liv had psychic abilities. Ravi, on the other hand, was an equal combination of comic relief and emotional ballast who backed Liv up as much as possible while also reveling in her more bizarre brain-personas (unless it was PhD scientist brain, who got on his nerves).

Brains, Bad Guys, and Bittersweet Goodbyes

And of course, a great show also needs a great bad guy, and iZombie found an ideal match in Blaine DeBeers (David Anders), a sleek and soulless zombie real-estate huckster who inadvertently scratches Liv at the beginning of the party she attends at the start of the series. Blaine is a bottom-feeder who rises to the challenge of supplying big brains to the monied undead. As he ups the ante from peddling tainted Utopium to trafficking brains, Blaine develops a clientele of well-heeled zombie “consumers” who develop an unhealthy dependence on his product. The perfect amount of oozing aristocratic disdain, daddy issues, and just the right dash of insidious charisma made Blaine a can’t-look-away villain.

A fan-favorite episode that is frequently brought up by viewers to this day is “Flight of the Living Dead,” an installment in which Liv eats the brain of her carefree, former sorority sister Holly (Tasya Teles), who dies in a skydiving “accident.” Holly’s hippie-butt-kicking zest for life and taking risks helps jar Liv from her own fear-driven, cautionary approach to her life as a zombie, making it a turning point for Liv’s emotional journey, and one of many poignant reminders that iZombie was first and foremost a story about rediscovering one’s humanity in the most unlikely of circumstances.

The show ran strong in its first couple of seasons, but lost some of its velocity as it plodded towards the end of its run. This was especially true with its finale, which fans found to be quite rushed and which lacked an emotional resolution that it so sorely needed. But if iZombie had a larger accomplishment, it was in earnestly embracing the absurd and still making it heartfelt. The humor was razor-edged, the puns vast (Major Lillywhite, The Scratching Post bar, and Ravi’s canine “Minor”), and the brain-eating cuisine—everything from stir-fry to hush puppies to protein shakes—was simultaneously gross and delicious.

Zombies. Guts. Murder. The CW’s horror-ish series iZombie has it all, and more.