Gnocchi with Medulla? The Gourmet Gross-Outs of iZombie

If there’s one thing that never really goes out of style, it’s zombies. From the graveyard to the silver screen, from video games to literature, there’s something about these shambling, groaning creatures of doom that makes them endlessly malleable to pop cultural adaptation. During the 2010s, zombies hit a decade-defining cultural peak on television. From AMC’s juggernaut The Walking Dead (2010–2022) to Netflix’s offbeat horror-comedy The Santa Clarita Diet (2017–2018), zombies were everywhere.

Somewhere in the middle of the decade sat The CW’s unfortunate iZombie, a once-little crime-solving, undead-drama, absurdist-comedy hybrid that brought a fresh new take to the zombie-apocalypse subgenre for a total of five seasons.

An often criminally overlooked gem, iZombie never quite hit the big-time viewing audiences but found a cult following due to its quirky wit, earnest cast, surprisingly original concept, and a team of creative veterans at the helm. Rob Thomas and Diane Ruggiero-Wright, the duo behind the series, were inspired by Chris Roberson and Michael Allred’s Vertigo comic series of the same name. But the show, despite taking some loose inspiration from the books, took major liberties and had a distinct undead heart of its own.

The show, meanwhile, decided to go in a different direction. That’s to say: set in Seattle and named Liv Moore—the show title is, of course, a very intentional nod to life—is played by Rose McIver as a type-A medical student who finds herself in the middle of a zombie outbreak, as well as a murder mystery, after attending a party on a boat that leads to mass hysteria and violence from a combination of a designer drug called Utopium and a caffeinated energy drink known as Max Rager.

Scratched and left for dead in a body bag, Liv is soon discovered to be one of “them,” an undead. She ends her engagement with her human fiancé Major (Robert Buckley), breaks with her roommate and childhood best friend Peyton (Aly Michalka), and lands a new job at the medical examiner’s office to discreetly get access to brains in a way that allows her to maintain her secret, as she explores what it means to be undead and in control of her own life.

Brains, Bad Guys, and Bittersweet Goodbyes

In iZombie, as in other zombie media, there is, of course, a villain. In this case, the walking villain of the show is Blaine DeBeers (David Anders), the oily, moustachioed former 1980s child actor turned depraved zombie dealer of tainted Utopium. After being found out by the police and local gangs as a minor and malignant player in the drug trade, Blaine smartly evolves into a drug-dealing and brain-trafficking operation for Seattle’s suddenly expanding class of wealthy zombie businessmen and women.

Crepitously charming with daddy issues, a tastefully rotten sense of dress, and a blue-collar bad-boy demeanor, Blaine was someone to be reckoned with, then and now.

Liv’s transformation upon ingesting the brain of victims was a prominent series-long feature: each person has memories that transfer to her through a bizarre twist that meant Liv would retain the memories, skill sets, and even personality traits of the brain donor. Liv had a deep well of persona, with every brain feeding an entirely new life into McIver’s broad range: a scene-stealing sassy dominatrix, a grouchy and gum-smacking old man, a straight-up romance novelist, a professional magician, and a British pub trivia expert, among so many others, each with its own story to tell and credibility in which to bask.

The Story Brains Tell

The show’s life lessons are uneven and often more instructive for the cast’s zombified than for its living players. Liv has a unique opportunity to play the part of the living as if she’s not, and, even as the series found her once-living fiancé, Major Lillywhite, or her begrudging-but-loving Ravi as undead partners, it was always clear that Liv was, more or less, singular in her position in life as undead-and-alive.

Liv’s opportunities for character development are one of the best elements of the show, and the most consistent thread. One of the more beloved and stand-out episodes among fans was “Flight of the Living Dead,” season episode four, when Liv eats the brain of her free-spirited former sorority sister Holly (Tasya Teles), who died in a skydiving “accident.” Holly, who embodies the “fun” and carefree spirit of former party life, invigorates her and is a turning point in her otherwise cautious approach to life. It’s one of the reminders that iZombie was, at its core, a story about rediscovering one’s humanity under the most unlikely of circumstances.

Sure, the show was about zombies, gore, and murder. But it was also, clearly, about the soul.