How iZombie Created a Zombie Show With Real Soul

Zombies never go out of style, but they hit peak cultural saturation on television during the 2010s. At one end of the decade was AMC’s juggernaut The Walking Dead (2010–2022), and on the other was Netflix’s offbeat zombie comedy-horror The Santa Clarita Diet (2017–2018). Somewhere in between sat iZombie, a crime-solving-meets-zombie-drama-meets-absurdist-comedy mashup that aired on The CW for five seasons.

Though it never achieved blockbuster-level status, iZombie developed a cult following due to its witty writing, endearing performances, and delightfully subversive take on the zombie genre. The series, created by Rob Thomas and Diane Ruggiero-Wright and loosely based on the Vertigo comic series by Chris Roberson and Michael Allred, took some liberties with its source material but maintained its undead spirit.

In the comic, Gwen Dylan is a zombie gravedigger living in Eugene, Oregon. She must eat human brains every 30 days to retain her memories, and is joined by an ex-boyfriend-turned-ghost and a were-terrier in her quest to live a meaningful undead life. The television series took a different direction with its premise. Set in Seattle, the show centers on Liv Moore (played by Rose McIver). Liv is a type-A medical student who, as a result of a deadly combination of a designer drug called Utopium and a mysterious energy drink called Max Rager, finds herself turned into a zombie after a boat party goes wrong.

Scratched by Blaine DeBeers (David Anders), a high-flying and morally bankrupt real-estate broker and drug dealer who’s also a zombie, Liv ends up in a body bag with no pulse and an impending sense of doom. When a rescue team retrieves the body bag from the river and Liv miraculously wakes up in the morgue, her zombified life begins. She immediately breaks off her engagement to her human fiancé, Major (Robert Buckley), shuns her roommate, Peyton (Aly Michalka), and applies for a job at the medical examiner’s office to have immediate and discreet access to brains. The latter is not exactly a secret for long, however, and Liv is soon discovered by her goofy and empathetic boss, Ravi (Rahul Kohli), a CDC scientist fired for his weird experimentation and now on a mission to find a cure for the zombie virus.

The Twist (Literally)

The show’s clever and funniest twist was that Liv takes on the memories and personality traits of the people whose brains she eats. The possibilities for zany and wildly different personas from one episode to the next were endless, and the range that McIver had to demonstrate to play every brain with sincerity was impressive. One minute, she might be a sassy dominatrix; the next, a crotchety old man. One brain could be a romance novelist who can’t stand horror films, and another a magician who wows the local horde with his sleight-of-hand tricks. There was also a brain whose life goal was to win pub trivia nights while working as a hitman for the mob, and so on.

In addition to being a supernatural lens on how we stay true to ourselves, iZombie was a murder-mystery procedural, and the brains that Liv consumed offered clues to solve murders, which in turn led to pairing Liv up with Det. Clive Babineaux (Malcolm Goodwin), who, at least initially, thinks Liv is a psychic. Ravi was a great comedic foil for Liv’s various, mostly deadpan expressions of everyman woes (except maybe when she became PhD scientist brain, which he found annoying).

Brains, Bad Guys, and Bittersweet Goodbyes

It’s a general rule in television that every good show needs a villain, and iZombie’s nemesis was Blaine DeBeers (David Anders), a slick, well-dressed zombie devoid of empathy whose sense of morality is pretty much bankrupt. Blaine transitions from the sketchy dealer with tainted Utopium to a brain trafficker with a network of rich zombie clients who require his product to live happy, brain-feasting lives. Blaine oozed with aristocratic disdain, daddy issues, and an absurd level of charisma and charm. He was hard not to watch, whether he was campily high on Utopium or slashing and stabbing his way through crimes of passion.

iZombie also had some strong players on its side, characters. Jessica Harmon’s character, Dale Brazzio, became Clive’s partner at the FBI, and Bryce Hodgson’s manic turn in season one as Scott E. was so popular with fans and the writers that the character was rebooted as twin brother Don E. and rebranded as a loyal sidekick to Blaine. Guest roles, like Daran Norris’ sleazy weatherman Johnny Frost, Steven Weber’s sleazy Max Rager CEO Vaughan Du Clark, and even Max Rager zombie daughter Rita (Leanne Lapp), offered both one-off laughs and longer-spanning story threads and threats.

The final seasons stumbled a bit in maintaining the momentum of the first two, with the finale in particular feeling rushed and not giving fans the emotional payoff that they wanted. But even with its ending, what iZombie accomplished was rare: It celebrated the weird and made it heartfelt. The humor was sharp and on-point, the puns were frequent and funny (Major Lillywhite, The Scratching Post bar, Ravi’s dog “Minor”), and the brain-based recipes from stir-fry to hush puppies to protein shakes were repulsively delightful.

The show indeed had zombies, gore, and murders. But it also had a soul.