The Comic vs. the Show: How iZombie Took Creative Liberties and Thrived

If there’s one pop-culture commodity that can never truly die, it’s zombies. But it sure felt like the 2010s were their decade, as that decade gave us AMC’s undead behemoth The Walking Dead (2010–2022) and Netflix’s underdog (sorry!) horror-comedy The Santa Clarita Diet (2017–2018). Wedged in the middle of those two is one of my personal favorites, the zombie-themed crime drama (with a heavy dose of the absurd) iZombie.

Airing on The CW for five seasons, iZombie never became a breakout hit, but it found a nice niche of fans with its combination of witty writing, earnest performances, and even for a zombie series, some original spins on the undead formula. The show was created by Rob Thomas and Diane Ruggiero-Wright and, as is often the case with shows based on graphic novels or comic books, loosely adapted from the source material— in this case, the Vertigo comic series of the same name by Chris Roberson and Michael Allred.

The show took a different path. Our heroine is Liv Moore (played by Rose McIver, a name with purpose as you’ll see shortly), a Seattle-based, type-A medical student and an aspiring doctor. She attends a party on a houseboat and… let’s just say it doesn’t end well. It’s a combination of a new designer drug called Utopium and a massive energy drink called Max Rager. Zombies on boats were the norm in those days, thanks to The Walking Dead (hi, Spencer), but our intro to Liv shows how one virus can set off a series of events that none of us would have predicted.

Liv is scratched during the boat party and eventually stumbles upon her now-empty body bag. She’s not dead, though; she’s one of the undead. So Liv breaks off an engagement with her human boyfriend, Major (Robert Buckley), and moves out of her roommate Peyton’s (Aly Michalka) apartment and into the morgue, where she can access brains with minimal fuss. But Liv’s carefully constructed little secret is quickly uncovered by her boss at the medical examiner’s office, Ravi (Rahul Kohli), a former CDC scientist on the hunt for a zombie virus cure.

Liv’s brain-snacking is a clever twist that serves two narrative purposes: (1) the brain-wiped zombie Liv eats brains to hold onto her identity; and (2) when she ingests a human’s brain, she temporarily gains access to their memories, personalities, and knowledge. That knowledge includes a pattern of clues to the murders the brains were all victims of, which allows her to partner with Det. Clive Babineaux (Malcolm Goodwin). Clive, for a while at least, is convinced Liv is psychic, and while he doesn’t know exactly what he’s dealing with, Ravi takes it in stride, and supports Liv no matter how bizarre her latest brain’s personality is, save for, maybe, the time she has the brain of a PhD scientist.

Brains, Bad Guys, and Hopelessly Sad Goodbyes

As it happens with most great shows, there’s an evil bad guy, and in iZombie‘s case, the bad guy who would forever change Liv’s life and their world is Blaine DeBeers (David Anders). If that name sounds familiar, that’s because he is a zombie who had a brief, two-season fling on The CW’s other zombie procedural, the aforementioned The Walking Dead, as the villainous Negan. David Anders is quite good as Blaine—a low-rent dealer of the new designer drug Utopium who gets sprung from jail, ups his game (and game to distribute) to trafficking brains. Those brains feed an underground market of the well-heeled among the living dead.

iZombie had some other great supporting characters, like Jessica Harmon’s stoic and methodical FBI agent Dale Brazzio, who eventually partners with Clive, and Bryce Hodgson’s turn as a special agent and special character named Scott E. in season one. Hodgson was so beloved, the writing staff found a way to bring him back as twin brother Don E., a bumbling underling (in more ways than one) for Blaine.

But as with so many good things, they didn’t last. The show had a promising start and a solid run, but the back half of its seasons sputtered, and it had a finale that a majority of fans despised for being rushed and without the proper emotional send-off. Overall, though, iZombie found a way to be offbeat and off-kilter while still finding a way to be heartfelt. It worked in large part because of how deadpan the jokes were; the puns were bold and plenty (Major Lillywhite, a bar called The Scratching Post, and Ravi’s dog “Minor”) and deliciously gross, the meals with a brain basis were (think stir-fry, hush puppies, and protein shakes).

Flight of the Living Dead

One episode from the show that has stuck with me, and a lot of fans as well, was season two’s “Flight of the Living Dead,” in which Liv eats the brain of Holly (Tasya Teles), a fellow ex-pledge at the all-girls college sorority Liv left after her brother died (Holly was more of a free spirit, much to Liv’s dismay). Holly died in a skydiving “accident” (death by proximity), and while Holly’s brain temporarily has Liv let loose of her pragmatic approach to life in general, it’s also an emotional turning point for Liv and one of many examples of how iZombie was, at its center, a tale about reclaiming one’s sense of self in the most unlikeliest of circumstances.

The show had zombies, gore, murder, and, yes, brains, but most of all, it had heart.