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Zombies have enjoyed a meteoric rise in popular
culture for the past few years now, which is ironic given their slow-moving,
lugubrious pace. Thanks to shows like The
Walking Dead and The Returned and
movies such as World War Z, zombies
are hot. This, again, is quite counterintuitive, because the skulking carcasses
we see on the screen are anything but. The tides of zombie lore
are changing, though, and the undead are now getting reanimated with feelings
and, well, life. Nowhere is that more
evident than in The CW's new iZombie,
starring Rose McIver.
Based on a
comic book series launched in 2010, iZombie
was adapted for television by Rob Thomas and Diane Ruggiero-Wright. Rose McIver
stars as Olivia "Liv" Moore (get it?), a promising medical
student with a loving fiancé whose life gets turned upside-down when she
attends a party and wakes up a zombie. She resorts to a job at the Seattle
morgue to satisfy her urge for brains, and soon discovers that she takes on the
memories and personality traits of the dead people whose brains she eats, which
allows her to act as the Seattle PD’s psychic consultant.
It runs the
risk of being over-the-top and campy, but in the hands of the team behind Veronica Mars, it isn't just a show about zombies. It’s a
story of resilience and reinvention, albeit with an occasional venture into
“full zombie mode.” What’s that? We spoke to McIver, a New Zealand native with the charming accent to prove it, to find out.
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