Sunday, January 21, 2018

(TV SERIES) iZombie Season 1 - Funny Interesting Series Where Zombie Assists Homicide Investigations

I could not remember how I found out about this series, but I am truly glad that I started to see this few days ago. When I watched the pilot episode, I was immediately hooked and could not stop it. I was always looking forward to the time when I finished my work so I could go home and continue watching it. Last night I finally completed the first season. So here are more details of the series.

Brief Story Line

Olivia "Liv" Moore (Rose McIver - A Christmas Prince etc) was a medical resident in Seattle's hospital and was engaged to Major Lilywhite (Robert Buckley - Lipstick Jungle, One Tree Hill TV series etc). Liv's life was turned upside down when one night she was turned into a zombie who had to eat people's brains. In order to keep a permanent supply of brains, she decided to work as assistant Medical Examiner in the morgue under her boss Ravi (Rahul Kohli). However, whenever Liv ate a human's brain, there was a side effect where she would sometime got a vision of the person's lives.

Meanwhile Clive Babineaux (Malcolm Goodwin - Freelancers, Breakout Kings TV series etc) was a homicide detective with the Seattle Police Department. During the course of his investigations, he would require the help from the ME office about the cause of death or other information of the victims. This would be where Liv's visions would come in handy while assisting Babineaux in the investigations.

But things would not be as easy as it would seem, especially with the appearance of a mysterious man called Blaine (David Anders - Alias, Heroes TV series etc) who would have an enormous impact on her life. So how would Liv deal with her life that was ruined by becoming a zombie? Could she hide her true condition from everyone including her best friend Peyton (Aly Michalka - Easy A, Phil of the Future TV series etc)? And how did she become a zombie in the first place? Find them all in the first season of this wonderful series.

End of Brief Story Line

Well I hope that the above brief story line did not reveal too much information as I would prefer that you enjoy the surprises and fun experience that I had while watching the series. There were few exciting twists and funny moments which usually happened during Liv's interaction with Ravi, or the amusing time whenever Liv's personality was affected by the human brains. Apart from fun moments, there were obviously some touching moments involving Liv as she tried her best to maintain her sanity as well as the relationships with Major and her family & friends. Detective Babineaux's occasional confused/amazed expressions whenever he saw something weird with Liv were also priceless.

I loved this series because it was able to combine the usually scary zombies into a livelier human-like person with a police procedural type of story. Police procedural series is one of my favorite genre of TV series where we would be shown various cases on each episode to be investigated to find the culprit and usually with a larger story arc that run through a whole series or few episodes (Monk, Castle, CSI, Criminal Minds, Lethal Weapon to name a few). Which is why when such genre was combined with a zombie, I had a lot of fun watching it. I think it had some similarities with another more comedic series like Psych which my wife also totally loved.

Through out the first season which ran for 13 episodes, I felt that the first few episodes were very fun and intriguing, but then the middle episodes became a bit too standard and seemed a bit losing momentum. However from episode 10 onwards it started to pick up the pace until the season finale which I absolutely loved. It was a very amazing episode and I felt it was the perfect finale for a first season. I really really am intrigued to see the following season to find out what happened after that ending.

The series did not have a lot of special effects and the cases sometime were not very very complicated. But it was actually the journey towards finding the bad person that was the main attraction. The makeup effects were so so for a series with zombies. So do not expect the type of zombie apocalypse series like The Walking Dead where the zombies were scary and always go around looking for humans to kill & eat. Interestingly, this series was loosely based on comic book of the same title from Vertigo (the part of DC comics which specialized in different type of heroes or anti-heroes, like Lucifer). There were some brief scenes that looked like they were taken from comic books which I personally think gave a nice touch. However, the comic book itself had different persons all together. The only similarities were the way the homicide investigations were solved through the "visions" from the victims' brains.

In short, if you are looking for a police procedural TV series where the main protagonist is a female zombie and had some funny moments with witty conversations, then this is definitely for you. Now if you prefer your zombie to be the main antagonist, then perhaps this would be too weird for you. However, I would still recommend you give this one a try and watch it as I am pretty sure it would provide you something different and fun. The choice is yours.

Happy watching!

Mike's movie moments rating: 4 out of 5 stars

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