Once you become successful, they key to remaining successful is to keep appeasing your audience. There’s a James Taylor song where he sings about his fans who “pay good money to hear Fire and Rain/again and again and again.” But fans also get bored easily. So what they want is the same thing as before, but different.
This is not an easy thing to achieve, but Rob Thomas has done it in his new series iZombie. Thomas’ best known creation is Veronica Mars, the spunky, adorable high school student who solved murders and generally kicked ass (at the late, lamented website Television Without Pity the character of Veronica Mars was voted the baddest kickass of the previous ten years). His new show is about Olivia Moore (Rose McIver), a spunky adorable medical student who solves murders and kicks ass; she also happens to eat brains because she’s a zombie. The show is co-created by Diane Ruggiero, who worked as a writer on the Veronica Mars series and wrote the surprisingly mediocre Veronica Mars movie.
On iZombie, being a zombie is a lot like being alive, except your hair turns white, you look a little pasty, and if you go too long without eating brains you get slow-witted and cranky. Olivia carries on by using a lot of bronzer and getting a job in the coroner’s office, which has a steady supply of corpses. One of the side effects of brain eating is getting flashes of memories from the deceased, which is where the crime solving comes in; Olivia eats the brains of a murder victim and starts impressing the homicide detective with her insights into the murder.
In some ways this is a riff on Psyche, where the hyper-observant detective had to pretend to have visions to have any credibility with the police; Olivia has to pretend to have visions because she can’t tell the detective she works with (Malcolm Goodwin) that she gets her insights from brain-eating. For the time being the only one who knows her secret is her boss, Dr. Chakrabarti (Rahul Kohli), who coincidentally was fired from the Center for Disease Control for being too aggressive about warning of a zombie apocalypse. He is totally cool with having an undead assistant and wants to diagnose her condition and maybe even find a cure.
On a personal level Olivia has become somewhat detached from her family, partly because as a zombie she has trouble working up any emotions and partly because she doesn’t want them exposed to her disease, especially her now ex-fiancee, Major Lillywhite (his first name is Major; one problem this show has is names, because if you haven’t noticed the undead protagonist is named Liv Moore), played by Robert Buckley. One of the saddest moments from the pilot is when Liv goes to Major’s house to explain her condition and she finds him with someone else, happily playing a kill-the-zombie video game.
iZombie manages to merge two genres, crossing The Walking Dead with CSI. Surprisingly, it works. Hopefully the murders to be investigated will be more interesting than the one in the pilot, but then pilots have to focus on exposition and not so much on plot. There are plenty of flashes of the trademark Rob Thomas dialog, and McIver invests Olivia with the right balance of pathos and attitude. I am a big fan of Rob Thomas’ series Veronica Mars as well as the earlier version of Cupid with Jeremy Piven, although I wasn’t impressed by the Veronica Mars movie and I thought the later version of Cupid with Bobby Cannavale was suck-tastic, so his track record is impressive but erratic. Based on the pilot episode of iZombie, it looks like Rob Thomas is back in form.
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