Why iZombie Nailed Its Premise (Until That Finale)

Zombies have a way of never really going out of style, but in the 2010s, they found a period of relative peak cultural dominance on television. We got AMC’s zombie apocalypse juggernaut, The Walking Dead (2010–2022), and Netflix’s offbeat horror-comedy take with The Santa Clarita Diet (2017–2018). Somewhere in the middle were five seasons of iZombie, a strange mix of crime procedural, undead soap opera, and surrealist humor that aired on The CW from 2015 to 2019.

In the original Vertigo comic series, Gwen Dylan is an Oregon zombie who works as a gravedigger in Eugene. She eats human brains every 30 days or so to keep her memories alive. She is also always accompanied by an eclectic trio of supernatural pals: a ghost and a were-terrier. The comics were a supernatural riff on the buddy movie, as Gwen’s discovery of who she was was seen through the lens of her new spectral friendship and the nature of her own identity.

The TV show changed the setting to Seattle and gave Liv Moore—yes, her name is a nod to someone’s misplaced sense of cleverness—a background in medicine instead of a mortuary job (played with spastic, Type A flair by New Zealand import Rose McIver). The show started fairly conventionally, too. Liv attends an after-party on a houseboat, which ends with mass poisoning when a new designer drug called Utopium mixes with a new energy drink, Max Rager. A zombie outbreak ensues. Scratched during the ruckus, Liv ends up in a body bag and wakes up to discover she’s become one of the undead. She breaks it off with her human fiancé, Major (Robert Buckley), and her upstairs roommate, Peyton (Aly Michalka), and takes a low-profile job at the medical examiner’s office to gain untraceable access to brains.

Liv is discovered by her kind-hearted, if socially awkward, boss Ravi (Rahul Kohli), a former CDC scientist who has taken the position to continue his (failed) search for a cure to the zombie virus. When Liv doesn’t seem too fazed by her new situation, Ravi (who is, by all accounts, in pretty good standing with the department as a scientist himself) plays his ace card: the brains that Liv eats imbue her with the memories of her victims.

Whether Liv’s borrowed brain was making her a sassy dominatrix, a curmudgeonly old man, a romance novelist, a magician, or a beer-swilling pub trivia champion hitman, the sincerity with which she acted out these brains made her ever-changing selves work. Some might call it a manic pixie dream brain, but you can’t argue with the results.

Liv teams with Det. Clive Babineaux (Malcolm Goodwin) to solve murder cases, as Clive (at least at first) believes Liv is psychic. Ravi, meanwhile, provides laughs, comic support, and scientific insight as Liv experiences her brain-addled adventures, with the caveat that he does get to be delightfully gleeful in her weirder forms (but maybe not when she took on the brain of a PhD scientist who worked at Ravi’s lab).

Brains, Bad Guys, and Bittersweet Goodbyes

Of course, for every McIver brain, there was a Blaine DeBeers. The slick, morally bankrupt zombie played by David Anders is the one who ultimately scratches Liv at the party. DeBeers’ character starts as a petty dealer in fake Utopium but later takes his criminal ambition to brain trafficking. He starts a lucrative service providing expensive organic brain transplants for a cadre of up-and-coming dead hipsters to rely on his syndicate, becoming one of the wealthier zombies in the city.

Cocky, no-nonsense, and an utter bastard with a flair for the British aristocrat snarl, Blaine is clearly in love with Liv, in the way that a sociopathic lizard person who scratched her might be. Anders gave the character some depth, especially once Liv entered his life as his only remaining friend, as the plot often relied on daddy issues and a sense of humanity his character gradually embraced.

The show had its share of super-fun side characters, too. Jessica Harmon’s FBI agent Dale Brazzio eventually became Clive’s full-time partner, and Bryce Hodgson’s short turn as the free-spirited Scott E. in season one was so popular that he was brought back as twin brother Don E. as Blaine’s sidekick and henchman. Some guest roles were also immensely fun or carried with them a certain one-off charm. Daran Norris was sleazy as regular news weatherman Johnny Frost, and Steven Weber had two very distinct turns as shady Max Rager CEO Vaughan Du Clark and his zombie daughter Rita (played by Leanne Lapp).

The final season lost some steam, however, and after a pretty good first season, things didn’t maintain that same energy. The series finale was widely panned as having a lot of ideas but not enough time, and its climax was abrupt and unsatisfying for many fans. That said, even with its eye toward the absurd, iZombie found a way to make its final moments fit with the story being told at the time.

Flight of the Living Dead

Liv eats the brain of a former sorority sister (Tasya Teles), Holly, who dies in a skydiving accident that turns out to be no accident. Holly’s carefree, devil-may-care attitude briefly supplants Liv’s more tightly wound persona, and “Flight of the Living Dead” becomes a key turning point for Liv. It is just one of many reminders that iZombie was a story as much about the rediscovery of one’s humanity in the most absurd of circumstances as it was about zombies and dead people cooking brains. Sure, there was that, but the show had a soul, too.