DC COMICS: Vertigo (iZombie)

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iZombie starring Rose McIver as a recently turned zombie who eats brains and helps solve crimes, premieres on Tuesday, March 17 at 9 p.m.

OVERALL PLOT:
Olivia “Liv” Moore was a rosy-cheeked, disciplined, over-achieving medical resident who had her life path completely mapped out…until the night she attended a party that unexpectedly turned into a zombie feeding frenzy. Now as one of the newly undead, Liv is doing her best to blend in and look as human as possible. Her appearance passes for “Goth,” with shockingly pale skin and nearly white hair, and her demeanor has gone from exuberant to exhausted.

The change in Liv is baffling to her former fiancé, Major, her mother, Eva, and her best friend and roommate, Peyton, who still has the high-energy, Type-A personality that Liv has completely abandoned. Despite her post-traumatic ennui, Liv has devised a clever way to resist her baser urges to devour fresh human brains – she’s taken a job in the Seattle coroner’s office. In this appropriately dead-end job, Liv can secretly snack on the brains of the many Jane and John Doe corpses that make a final stop in the morgue. Despite carefully covering her tracks, Liv’s brilliant but eccentric boss, Dr. Ravi Chakrabarti, discovers her secret and is surprisingly excited about the scientific possibilities. Dr. Ravi even helps Liv in her search for Blaine, the zombie responsible for her current undead status.

Even with her boss’ enthusiasm, Liv remains resigned to an eternity as a zombie without hope or purpose – until she realizes that with every brain she consumes, she retains a portion of that person’s memories. Liv suddenly begins to experience disturbing and often violent visions from the point of view of the murder victims. Much to the surprise of Dr. Ravi and homicide detective Clive Babineaux, Liv often has detailed knowledge of crime scenes and motives that she can’t easily explain. Posing as a psychic, she works with Detective Babineaux to investigate these crimes and discover who is responsible. It’s not the same as being alive again, but at least she can find purpose in her undead existence by helping Clive solve the murders of those who are indeed fully dead.

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MONITOR'S NOTES: Not the Same as the Comic Book
In today's installment of DC All Access, DC Entertainment's Tiffany Smith sits down with The CW's Rob Thomas, creator of Veronica Mars and the man who developed iZombie for television with his longtime producing partner Diane Ruggiero-Wright. "In the comic book, there are all sorts of monsters, but that HBO show True Blood was already doing the all the monsters," said Thomas of the decision to change so much from the comics. "And there's also like a vampire/werewolf/ghost show. So I wanted to stay out of that territory." That said, he discusses in the video what he'd already said previously: that they try to carry the high concept and the tone over from the comics by Chris Roberson and Mike Allred. "I think what we carried over was the big idea of the comic book which is this woman in her mid-20s becomes a functioning zombie and when she eats brains she inherits the memories," Thomas told me at Comic Con this summer. "Even in the comic book she tries to solve these outstanding issues of the dead and we play that in the TV series as well. What I needed was a story mechanism that allowed her to do it every week. I wanted very closed cases and working in the police morgue gave me a dead, murdered body each week which made it easier to adapt as a TV show." In the video, Thomas elaborated, "I'll be honest, and this makes no sense: I like virus-caused zombies as opposed to supernatural, curse of the pharaoh-type zombies. It's weird that I have to believe in fake science rather than fake supernatural stuff when I write, but that's just kind of a personal taste thing."