iZombie - Early thoughts

Detective Babineaux (Malcolm Goodwin), Olivia Moore (Rose McIver), Major* Lilywhite (Robert Buckley) and Ravi Chakrabati (Rahul Kholi).

Olivia 'Liv' Moore is a gifted resident doctor with a gorgeous fiance and generally perfect life, until she is persuaded, against her usual inclination, to attend a boat party, where she is scratched by a zombie drug dealer and becomes one of the undead.

Five months later, Liv is working at the morgue and consuming the brains of the innocuously deceased to stay compos mentis. The senior ME catches onto her secret and wants to study her to find a cure, while she struggles to keep her family and now ex-fiance at arm's length due to the risk of accidental brain eating. Things take an interesting turn when she partners up with newly transfered homicide detective Babineaux, in order to exploit her ability to access - albeit sporadically - the memories of those whose brains she consumes.

As an ongoing plot, the dealer who scratched Liv is still around and running what basically amounts to a zombie racket, scratching people and then charging them a fortune for designer brain chow harvested from the homeless and otherwise largely unmissed. Major, the ex-fiance, is a social worker, so he's gradually tracking down the racket.

Clearly someone in the publicity department was all 'you
know, from the right angle she looks hella like Emily
Deschanel.

iZombie - a very loose adaptation of the comic of the same name** - is a fun, quirky cop show; essentially cop and psychic, with added brain eating. Actually, that's not accurate, as it dismisses the real meat of the show, which is that the side-effects of the brain eating include absorbing aspects of the meal's personality, allowing Rose McIver to really stretch her range by essentially playing an entirely different version of Liv each week.

So far (I'm on about Episode 5) she's been a sensuous artist, a fact-obsessed sociopath, a daredevil free spirit and a paranoid gangster. Each week has also featured an instance of 'full-on zombie mode', wherein Liv becomes possessed of superhuman strength and an irresistible drive to kill.

* Name, not rank. I was so disappointed his surname wasn't Major as well.
** The protagonist has a different name, backstory, set of friends, and the series is clearly aiming for a pseudoscientific zombism instead of the comics' overtly metaphysical approach.