The Netflix Horror Crime Procedural You Didn’t Know Was Based On A Comic

What is iZombie actually about? It revolves around Seattle-based medical resident Olivia “Liv” Moore. She gets turned into a zombie but decides to get smart about it, satisfying her craving for human flesh by getting a job at the morgue and snacking on brains. 

This helps keep her from turning full-blown monster, instead appearing most of the time as the world’s palest young woman. But when she discovers that eating the brains of murdered people helps her see clues about their killers, she teams up with a local detective in order to take a bite out of crime in her own unique way.

Speaking of that team-up, while the entire iZombie cast is immensely talented, our favorite part was the chemistry between the two leads. Rose McIver plays Liv, and she does a great job portraying a goodhearted woman trying to both suppress her monstrous urges and make the world a better place.

Malcolm Goodwin plays the career-minded Detective Clive Babineaux, and because the show mercifully doesn’t try to romantically push its leads together, we get to enjoy their onscreen friendship without any of the “will they, won’t they” tension that was old even when Moonlighting was new. 

If you’re on the fence about whether you’d like iZombie, we have a simple question: were you a big fan of Veronica Mars? Rob Thomas is the showrunner for each series, and he has a solid track record of making genre television that feels effortlessly hip.

This show also helped Thomas scratch a creative itch: he had ironically been in the middle of pitching an entirely different zombie show when The Walking Dead premiered and he had to drop his idea because it would have looked like he was ripping off that hit AMC show.

In an unusual twist, some of the only people who really hate the iZombie show are fans of the comic it is based on, and their anger is driven by the fact that the show and comic are almost nothing alike.

The comics, for example, have a different name for the main character, one whose transformation isn’t caused by a bite and who can’t really remember her pre-zombie life. Plus, the comic didn’t have some of the fan-favorite show characters like Ravi, though it did have a friendly ghost that the show replaced with a friendlier lawyer.

All of these changes from the comic worked out big time, and iZombie currently has a 92 percent audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. The show went on to enjoy five seasons on the CW, and while it didn’t perfectly stick the landing, the journey was more than worth the effort of watching, couchZombie style.

To experience the show for yourself, you don’t need to eat the brain of a critic or film writer (honestly, we only have so much to spare)–all you have to do is stream iZombie on Netflix today.