Everything I love about iZombie

What's a blog for if you don't attempt to use it to convince the world to love the things you love? One thing I've been loving lately is the TV show iZombie.

It's a CW show that aired from 2015-2019. The main character, Liv Moore, is a young doctor who gets turned into a zombie. As long as she eats brains, she remains a relatively normal person. If she doesn't, she'll turn into one of the mindless zombies we know from horror movies. She quits her doctor job to work at a police morgue for easy access to brains, and eats the brains of murder victims. This gives her visions of the victims' memories, which she uses to help solve their murders. She partners with detective Clive Babineaux, to whom she claims to be a psychic. Clive, a pragmatic guy, goes along with it. Oh, and Liv is not the only zombie out there.

However good you think the show sounds from that synopsis, it's somewhere between 5 and 20 times better than that. Here's why:

  1. Kitchen sink approach to genre. It's a high-concept police procedural with elements of comedy, romance, horror, mystery (of the murder-of-the-week variety as well as season-long arcs), thriller, action, science fiction, political satire, and hangout show. (YMMV, but I find the core friend group of Liv, Peyton, Ravi, and Major to be a really charming one, and I like the “everybody gathering on the couch to watch a movie” moments we get as occasional breathers almost as much as the drama they punctuate!)
  2. A lot going on plot-wise, too. Season 2 alone has three major villains, on top of each episode's murder of the week, who all cross paths with each other in interesting ways.
  3. Successfully changes things up from season to season. Villains get replaced by new villains, new characters find out about zombies, become zombies, or get cured of zombieism, and all this succeeds at keeping things interesting because these changes have major effects on the relationships between characters and the way the plot develops.
  4. If all that's starting to sound complicated, know that it's still easy to watch. It is a CW show, after all.
  5. The cast is excellent. According to their various Wikipedia pages, most of the main actors are all “best known for their role in iZombie”, so I can't name a lot of big names (best I can do is Aly Michalka of Aly & AJ, and Rose McIver of A Christmas Prince), but they're all incredibly well-cast and charming.
  6. Eating brains doesn't only give zombies access to memories; they also take on some personality aspects of the deceased. This means that actors get to do a lot acting-wise. It can get always gets a bit very broad, but this is a CW show, after all. Liv is the biggest chameleon, but Major gets some chances to shine, too.
  7. Do you like puns? This show has puns. The lead zombie? Liv Moore. The artisanal butcher shop selling brains on the side? Meat Cute. The funeral home selling brains on the side? Shady Plots. The zombie-run military contracting firm? Fillmore Graves. The Amazon expy? U-Freight-Eze. For a few episodes, the guy named Major has a dog named Minor.
  8. Not into puns? Then perhaps you'll enjoy the Buzzfeed-GIF-recipe-inspired brain cooking scenes. (Don't worry about the, uh, blue brains. There's an explanation for that.)