Last night “iZombie” premiered on the CW Network. It’s a comic book to television series adaption that sees Liv, a coroner’s office assistant, working that field for the easy access to human brains…since she been reanimated as a zombie hybrid after dying in a brutal beach attack. She looks relatively normal, despite the red around her eyes and lack of pigment in her skin and hair, but that’s only because she can suppress her zombie urges and powers in hopes of maintaining some semblance of a normal life. After eating a particular brain, Liv finds that she can have vision-like moments where she can recall the victim’s previous memories leading up to the moment of their death. She then decides to use this newfound power to solve open murder cases and to find a purpose in her undead life again.
“iZombie” was adapted from comic book to television series by Rob Thomas and Diane Ruggiero-Wright. Previously Thomas was the show-runner for another teen-mystery series, “Veronica Mars.” Currently, a lot of people are making comparisons between “iZombie” and “Veronica Mars,” but I only see the most similarities between “iZombie” and “Tru Calling.” If you remember, “Tru Calling” was a supernatural series fronted by Eliza Dushku which lasted for 26 episodes on FOX between 2003 and 2005. Dushku played the role of Tru Davies, a morgue technician who finds that she can communicate with dead bodies in the morgue, a power that will then immediately send her 24 hours into the past to try and keep the victim from dying again. In this case “Tru Calling” did the supernatural heroin solving murders thing better.
I think “iZombie” was adapted only to try and capitalize on the zombie craze that’s been lead by “The Walking Dead” for the last five years. One of the problems with the pilot episode is that they skipped over the big zombie attack scene, more-so they crammed what viewers wanted to see into little 30 second montages. Judging from the cliffhanger at the end of the episode, there should be more zombie mauling in future episodes, but I can only wonder how the CW will find a way to ruin that. I mean, the network’s audience for its 8-10PM time slot is basically girls aged 13-18. That means they are going to tone down the levels of gore and violence; not because young women are too delicate for the subject material, but because they have to cater to their larger audience, one that aren’t true horror fans like most of us. In other words, don’t tune in to “iZombie” if you’re looking for scary, bloody zombie massacres. I highly doubt that’s going to happen here. This is more catered as a drama with slight comedic and romantic elements.
While everything is filmed nicely, as every show on the CW is, all of the other necessary components are missing. We have no hardcore zombie action and a plot that’s aimed solely toward teen girls. On top of that you have a silly plot where no one seems to notice that Liv has the body of a dead person and the two other lead characters are annoying as fuck. I mean, annoying as fuck. Liv’s boss, I just can’t take him seriously. Who actually wrote a character that way? And the detective who will undoubtedly work alongside her to solve the murders, comes off like a cheesy 1970s mob villain more than a member of any current police force. My god… Just horrible character writing. The actress portraying Liv is extremely flat, monotone, and boring, but I don’t know if I should criticize that or not because there’s a good chance she’s supposed to be played that way because of the undead thing. I would have enjoyed this so much more with different characters involved, so no disrespect to the actors when their scripts were probably never that great to begin with.
Luckily “iZombie” was lead into broadcast by “The Flash,” so I’m sure some of the superhero series’ 4,000,000 audience will run off onto “iZombie.” If I had to make a guess, I’d say “iZombie” was watched by 2,300,000 people for its debut episode. Do I think it’ll be able to maintain that in the future? No, I don’t. You can’t have a successful series where the script and characters are the biggest detriment and a show about zombies without any good zombie violence. Now, I do understand that I am far outside of the show’s target audience, but I still wanted to give it a fair shot. I looked for other reviews and Screen Rant and Entertainment Weekly seem to disagree with me in a big way… But, for me, this was a big miss. This is not the show for me.
