A traumatic event causes a pretty young woman to feel like an outsider, solve crimes, and yearn for her past love while narrating her current life situation. Sound familiar? I’m sure it does. I personally have never read an iZombie comic, so I was a little thrown off by it’s initial logline when it was announced as being picked up. The only thing I knew going in was that Rob Thomas, creator of my beloved Veronica Mars was attached to the project and that was enough for me. Of course, this begs the question, why is that enough? Should we base our assumption that this will either be good, or bad just on it’s similarities to Veronica Mars? Sure there are similarities, but there are also differences. If I could attempt to describe what iZombie feels like I would say it’s more of a Tru Calling meets Veronica Mars with a bit of Psych mixed in where the main character is a zombie. On a network where procedurals don’t seem to flourish (See Emily Owens, Beauty and the Beast) iZombie looks to be a big gamble for the network, so it’s really going to depend on all parties involved to truly make this show inviting to the audience. I would wager to say the pilot does just that and no more or less, which is pretty positive depending on how you look at it.
Meet Liv: Liv (Rose McIver) is a zombie now, but up until a five months ago Liv was medical resident with a pretty good life. All that comes crashing down after she heads to party she was invited to by a coworker, at Major’s (Her fiance) persistence, that changes her life forever. One minute she’s refusing to take some new drug named Utopia, then the next she’s waking up in a bodybag, undergoing a zombie transformation. Now Liv has changed drastically from the hyper-focused determined fireball she was to a lazy couch potato who works at the morgue. She’s ended things with Major, and lost her way in life so her loved ones stage an intervention event, Potluck Tuesday to discuss her apparent PTSD stemming from that fateful night where those druggies killed each other and then set the party boat on fire(the official word on what happened). It’s not like Liv doesn’t know that she is no longer passionate, confident, ambitious and alive. Liv is just, now more hungry than anything else, which is why she decided to work in the morgue. Free access to brains. It is following this fateful Potluck Tuesday that Liv slips up while eating a Jane Doe’s brain and is caught by her boss, Dr. Ravi Chakrabarti(Rahul Kohli). You’d think he’d be running for the hills or calling the CDC, but Ravi’s just got some questions for Liv. Ravi was always a bit suspicious following the Lake Washington massacre when several of the bodies were missing significant amounts of brain mass that were explained away by fish eating at the corpses even though there was virus that suggested otherwise. Ravi is a bit of a conspiracy theorist who was let go from the CDC for being being pretty persistent that the age of zombies would one day come. He has suspected something was up with Liv since he first noticed a corpse missing a brain, and Liv just can’t believe how normal he seems with all of this. Ravi gives off some major Davis from Tru Calling vibes in his excitement at discovering Liv’s real identity. Their conversation is also pretty good for setting up some exposition on how Liv’s being a zombie works.
iZombie premieres Tuesday, March 17th at 9pm following The Flash on the CW.
Source : spoilertv.com
