iZombie ran for five seasons on The CW, from March 17, 2015 to August 1, 2019, and it never quite got the credit it was owed. Rob Thomas and Diane Ruggiero-Wright built it from the DC comic by Chris Roberson and Michael Allred.
The premise is a joke that keeps paying off: a Seattle medical resident named Olivia “Liv” Moore, played by Rose McIver, gets turned into a zombie at a boat party. She abandons her career and breaks up with her fiancé and takes a job at the King County morgue so she can eat the brains of the corpses she autopsies instead of killing people. Every brain she eats hands her a dead stranger’s memories, skills and quirks. Every brain is also a murder case.
Trailer, via IGN.
Rose McIver Eats a Different Person Every Week
That is the engine, and it is a better one than the show usually gets credit for. McIver has to play a new person inside the same body roughly every episode, absorbing random quirks and personality traits from the brains she eats. The show treats this as comedy and as grief at the same time, and McIver carries both without breaking. It is the kind of role that looks like a stunt and is actually a test, and she passes it for 71 episodes.
The mechanic also solves a problem most procedurals never solve. Liv’s flashbacks are clues, not decoration. When a victim was murdered, the memories point at the killer. She uses them to help Seattle Police Detective Clive Babineaux close cases.
Clive Babineaux and the Psychic-ish Lie
Malcolm Goodwin plays Clive, newly transferred from vice to homicide when the series starts. Liv and Ravi tell him she is “psychic-ish” to explain how she knows what she knows. He buys it for a season, then learns the truth in the second season.
Goodwin’s best work is in that gap. Clive is a good cop who is being lied to by a friend, and the show lets him be angry about it rather than making him a punchline. He wants to make captain. He is in a relationship with Dale Bozzio, a former federal agent turned cop. None of that is filler; it is the show building a second lead who can carry scenes without Liv in them.
Ravi Chakrabarti and the Cure That Never Quite Arrives
Rahul Kohli’s Ravi is the show’s conscience and its comic relief, and the balance holds longer than it should. He is the medical examiner who guesses Liv’s secret early, becomes her friend and confidant, and starts working on a cure. He used to work for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He was fired for his obsession with preparing for a biological weapons attack, which is the show’s cleanest joke about him: the one man who saw it coming was punished for seeing it.
The cure is the show’s long arc, and it is the right one. Ravi’s hope that Liv can return to her former life is what keeps iZombie from becoming nihilistic. It also keeps the stakes personal when the plot goes big.
Major Lilywhite, Blaine DeBeers and the Zombie Economy
Robert Buckley plays Major Lilywhite, Liv’s ex-fiancé. She ended the relationship to protect him, and the show spends years paying that off. David Anders plays Blaine DeBeers, the zombie who turns the condition into a business, and Anders is the reason the villainy works. Blaine is charming, useful and never trustworthy, and the show knows better than to redeem him fully.
The world-building is where iZombie separates itself from its genre peers. Across the first few seasons, the number of zombies in Seattle grows. Different factions try to hide them, fight them, exploit them or protect them. At the end of the third season, a zombie-run private military company infects thousands of people in Seattle and imposes martial law to create a safe haven for zombies. The final two seasons live under that occupation, and Liv becomes the leader of a human smuggling operation bringing people who want to get in.
The CW Show That Got Bigger Than Its Premise
That turn is the show’s bravest move and its messiest. A procedural about a woman eating brains to solve murders becomes a story about occupation, quarantine and who counts as a person. The shift costs the show some of its lightness. It gains a real argument.
The casting churn behind the scenes is worth noting because it shaped what ended up on screen. Alexandra Krosney originally played Peyton Charles. After the series was ordered, Aly Michalka replaced her and the role went from regular to recurring. On May 22, 2016, Michalka was promoted to series regular for the third season. Nora Dunn was initially attached to play Liv’s mother, but the character ended up smaller than first envisioned and Molly Hagan took the part. Thomas has said that move was a financial decision.
Two more promotions followed. On July 21, 2017, Robert Knepper was promoted to series regular for the fourth season. On September 27, 2018, Bryce Hodgson was promoted to series regular for the fifth and final season. Anders said after Knepper’s departure that he had suggested Rutger Hauer to play his character’s father, and that he believed Knepper did well in the role.
What iZombie Gets Right
The show’s real achievement is tonal. It is a drama, a crime show and science fiction at once, and it rarely lets one register cancel the others. Liv eats a brain and becomes someone else for an hour. The comedy comes from the mismatch between what she is doing and how ordinary her life looks. The horror comes from the same place.
The supporting cast keeps the whole thing upright. Aly Michalka’s Peyton grows into a real character rather than a leftover from the pilot. Bryce Hodgson’s Don E. becomes a genuine presence once the show promotes him. The show is generous with its people in a way that most genre series are not.
Where iZombie Stumbles
Five seasons is a long time to sustain a premise this narrow, and the back half shows it. The martial-law arc raises the stakes but thins out the case-of-the-week pleasure that made the early seasons work. Once Seattle is under occupation, the show has less room for the small, funny business of Liv absorbing a stranger’s personality. The brains still come, but the novelty dulls.
The cure storyline also stretches. Ravi’s work is the emotional spine, and the show has to keep it unresolved to keep the series running. That is a structural problem, not a writing failure, but it is visible.
Here is how the five seasons rank, best to weakest:
- Season 2 — Clive learns the truth, the zombie population grows, and the show is still funny.
- Season 1 — the premise lands clean and McIver establishes the whole trick.
- Season 3 — the martial-law turn is bold, and it costs the show some of its charm.
- Season 4 — occupation politics crowd out the case-of-the-week pleasure.
- Season 5 — the final run, more ambitious and less fun than what came before.
The Verdict on iZombie
iZombie is a smart, funny, unusually humane genre show that used a silly premise to ask serious questions about identity, appetite and who gets to be treated as human. Rose McIver does the heaviest lifting, and she does it for the whole run. The show’s best seasons are its first three, when the case-of-the-week format and the growing zombie population are still in balance. The last two are more ambitious and less fun, and the trade is not always worth it.
The published critical score of 7.4 out of 10 is fair, and it undersells the show’s peak while accurately describing its whole. iZombie is not a great series start to finish. It is a very good one with a great central performance, a strong supporting cast and a premise it refused to waste. That is more than most shows with this kind of logline manage.
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