Olivia is a driven, workaholic medical intern with a bright future and an understanding, handsome fiance' in Major. When "Liv" is invited to a party, the supportive boyfriend urges her to attend and cut loose for once. Good times bad times! While there, Liv is offered a new designer drug called Utopia, which minutes later has the hipsters turning into violent, flesh eating zombies.
Next thing she knows, Liv is waking up dead. Starting a new life as coroner, who has developed taste for (you guessed it) brains, she finds upon consuming someones cranium meat that she also gets their memories and habits. Her boss, Dr. Chakrabarti, quickly figures out Liv is indeed undead, and having lost his previous job at the CDC due to his insistence that something like a zombie apocalypse was an inevitability, to be brought on by something man-made, he becomes Liv's one-man support network. When Liv feasts on the brain of a dead prostitute, she begins getting visions of the killer, and becomes a defacto assistant to rookie homicide investigator Detective Babineaux.
I am a pretty big fan of the Vertigo imprint comicbook from which iZombie is culled, and was incredibly disappointed when I found out huge changes were being made to the basis and tone of the story. Gone from the graphic version are many of the characters I already loved. No weredog boy, no immortal Mummy-ish Egyptian prince, no bad ass government sanctioned monster hunters. I in no way set out to like this show, but decided to give it a shot anyway when co-creator Mike Alred (the classic MADMAN) insisted it all worked really well. I took that pretty cynically, assuming a paycheck and a toe into the door of working in Hollywood was making things prettier smelling for the creators than they were for the fans. That said, I must admit, after watching the pilot I now "get it". Had the television show stuck with the original concepts down the line, it could have come off as incredibly soapy. Instead they opted to go for CSI-meets-YA-horror thing, with huge dashes of pop culture references, and snappy (albeit sometimes annoying to an old geezer like myself) dialog. But the format of iZombie, which is a self contained story episode to episode, with a bigger far reaching arc concerning Liv's ex, her family, her secret, and her burgeoning working relationships/friendships with the shows other characters, works pretty darned good. This isn't a program aimed at my generation (70's kids who grew up on Creature Features and single screen theaters), and that's okay. It's target audience is obviously younger "geeks and nerd" who don't remember when things like comicbook conventions were only attended by pimply, introverted fans (of which I definitely was one) and where it was rare to see a guy dressed in a Superman costume who weighed less than 250 lbs, and most of that below the waistband.
It's a bit geek chic, but once I got synched up with the tone of the show it grew on me pretty quick. Is it the savior of genre television, raising the bar on zombie mythology? Nope. Is it fun for the kids, and a nice and relatively safe gateway to other more caustic material? Yes.
At the end of the day, not a bad start to a show that will garner obvious comparisons to fare like BUFFY, as well as other Whedon joints, and recent contributions like WARM BODIES. I for one wil be giving it three episodes to turn me into a regular viewer. Right now the outlook seems to be more on the positive than negative side. If you can set aside any cynicism you may have for the current wave of undead flicks, etc, or have a tatse for YA-genre-mashing horror tinged stuff, you'll probably find iZombie at least digestible.
iZombie can be see Tuesday nights on the WB, or the next day on HuluPlus.
Rating: 3 out of 5
~ Boris Lugosi
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