TV I'm Watching: iZombie

Or, welcome to back Neptune, AKA Seattle.

So, I've just started watching iZombie, which you can watch on Hulu (though the full run isn't available). I knew, even back when talk of it started circulating, that I would give it a shot, because Rob Thomas and Diane Ruggiero were the showrunners. As in, the folks responsible for the spectacular Veronica Mars. So I had it on my queue and sort of knew I would get to it eventually, and then I read that David Anders was in it.

David Anders is on this show. Oh hey, here's a picture of me and David Anders, when we randomly ran into him outside a club in West Hollywood eight or so years ago:



...wait, what were we talking about again? OH. iZombie, yes. So I read that he was on the show, and I immediately brought the show up on Hulu and discovered the first episode was expired, so I bought it on Amazon Prime. I've just watched the fifth episode, "Flight of the Living Dead," and y'all. Y'ALL. This show is great. It was sort of all over the place for a few episodes--very Veronica Mars in tone, wry and morbidly funny, but not quite sure what it wanted to do. It is based on a comic book, though from what I understand, "inspired by" might be a better term.

The Concept: Liv Moore (GET IT), a young doctor, with everything in life going perfectly, goes to a party and gets turned into a zombie. She wakes up on the beach, undead. As she adapts, she quits her job as a surgeon and starts up as a medical examiner. She breaks up with her fiance, and also starts solving crime. Turns out, whenever she eats somebody's brains (with generous amounts of hot sauce, because zombie taste buds aren't delicate), she gets flashes of their memories, and also temporary infusions of a few of their personality quirks. She then convinces a homicide detective she's a psychic, because obviously that's what happens when zombies decide to fight crime.

SPOILERS for up to the fifth aired episode, FYI.



I still have five episodes to watch, so I'm working from a limited standpoint. That said, here are four things that I dig about the show:

1. 
   
   I mentioned David Anders is in this right? And he's having a marvelous time. Think, say, Sark as an entrepreneurial zombie instead of a spy. His name is Blaine, and he is remarkably pale and bleached blond. Think of him as charming and devious, an effortless liar, who manipulates everybody around him so that they answer to him, and only him. Think of him as a zombie that hires a chef to make brain-eating an elegant pursuit. This might, perhaps, be Anders's ur-role. It is what he is meant to be.
   
   
2. 
   
   The delightful gentleman on the left is Ravi, Liv's boss/partner in the medical examiner's office. He grokked onto her zombie nature before she told him--one of the very earliest scenes was him catching her eating brains and not being surprised. Instead, he's delightfully scientific about it--he runs all sorts of tests to see how the whole undead thing works, but not in a mad scientist way. He's genuinely excited and curious, and also is pretty much Liv's best friend and only non-zombie confidante. They are great. Also, he's the new roommate of Liv's ex, Major, but I have yet to see that side plot come to any interesting fruition. But, yes. Ravi! He's awesome.
   
   
3. 
   
   Detective Clive Babineaux, beleaguered homicide detective. While his whole, "yes, I totally believe in your psychic powers, suspiciously pale woman" deserves some side-eye, Clive's already got way more depth than we usually see in TV detectives. For one, there's a clear sense that he's good at his job, but awful at politics. He was deep undercover in Vice for a long time, which leads others to treat him with suspicion. He's rightly frustrated when Liv pops in, wide-eyed, and pokes and pokes him until he investigates one of her "visions." And he's got a good heart. The fifth episode has Major come in (for the second time, but the first time without Liv around) and ask for Clive's help following up on a missing teenager. It's the best, and possibly ONLY, character depth we've seen in Major so far. And following up is a scene where Clive walks into a skate park, gets clocked as five-0, and corners a kid with his prickly stare. Which leads to the kid nodding him over to a board plastered with missing persons flyers. It's excellent work--the conversations have a believable cadence, and the non-verbal cues lend the interactions a lot of depth. I'm looking forward to seeing more of this--a show where the non-Liv characters have lives beyond Liv will be a good one.
   
   (I will note--Liv's roommate and supposedly best friend Peyton has had almost zero development. Liv's parents were pretty one-note in the premiere, and Liv's brother in a previous episode was a creep who kept creeping in Peyton's bedroom. So it's not ALL great character work so far.)
   
   
4. 
   
   The fifth episode also introduced Lowell, a gorgeous rock star who starts as a murder suspect. When he first sees Liv at the crime scene, he stares at her, almost shocked. In the next scene, he flirts with her to the extent that I thought, hey, maybe he's guilty. And in their third scene together--in one of the most spectacularly-constructed scenes I've ever watched--he offers to make Liv a drink while they chat about the case. Instead of doing vague drink-making-like gestures, the camera frames him so we can see exactly what he's doing: swiping lime wedges around the edge of two glasses, then twisting the rims with cayenne. Pouring the tequila and the tomato juice, and then quickly adding glugs of hot sauce. Carefully slicing two bright red jalapeno peppers to garnish the drink, and when he presents it to Liv, she notes, "This is hot." And that, friends, is how Lowell reveals he knows Liv is a zombie. Because hey, he is, too.
   
   I have no idea where this love interest thing will go, but in a universe of TV shows that constantly have actors flailing around empty coffee cups, this scene will remain glorious in my memory.

So, yeah. iZombie. It's worth a watch, folks.



I realize I mostly talked about handsome gentlemen in this post, which is sort of missing a major thing: Liv. Liv is delightful. She sort of sad and messed up, as new zombies are wont to be, but she's also caring and intelligent and wry. It's hard for me to talk about her, because her voice is so very Veronica Mars, but I dig her. I'm hoping she'll get more to develop beside "I hate murderers" and "I am sad I am a zombie, mostly because I can't make out with my ex." Anyway, I'm off to the sixth episode now.