iZombie: The Complete First Season Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.5
Video		4.5
Audio		3.5
Extras		2.5
Overall		4.0

iZombie: The Complete First Season Blu-ray Movie Review

Undead and Not Loving It

Reviewed by Michael Reuben July 12, 2016

Fans of Veronica Mars and Buffy the Vampire Slayer who have suffered withdrawal since those series ended should tune into The CW's iZombie, if they aren't already watching. Veronica's producers, Rob Thomas and Diane Ruggiero-Wright, are the creative team behind this adaptation of the Vertigo comic series, and they consciously used Buffy as a model in crafting an off-beat mash-up of serious detectives and comical monsters (or is it the other way around?). Like Veronica, iZombie's heroine is an investigator and crime-solver. Like Buffy, she has special powers and a true love from whom she is forced to separate herself. She also has her own version of a Scooby gang, whose connections, romantic and otherwise, provide endless fodder for subplots. And like both Buffy and Veronica, the series features quotably snappy dialogue studded with inside jokes, wordplay and pop culture references.

iZombie premiered on The CW on March 17, 2015, with a first season that ran thirteen episodes. A second season of nineteen episodes began airing the following October. The show returns for its third outing this fall. In anticipation of iZombie's new season, the Warner Archive Collection has added the series to its expanding roster of cult shows on Blu-ray.

The TV adaptation of iZombie retains the comic books' central premise, in which the heroine experiences memories and traits of the people she consumes, but it changes almost everything else, including the main character's name and her hometown. Gwen Dylan of Eugene, Oregon, has now become Olivia Moore (Rose McIver), a medical resident in Seattle, whose nickname "Liv" makes her life a pun waiting to happen. (It's only the first of many joke names that the series gives to people, places and things.) After attending a boat party that abruptly erupts in violence, Liv awakens the next morning with the pigment drained from her hair and skin and an urgent craving to consume human brains. Quickly adapting to her new circumstances, she drops out of med school and takes a job as an assistant medical examiner, thereby guaranteeing access to a steady supply of sweetbreads. She also breaks up with her fiancé and college sweetheart, Major Lilywhite (Robert Buckley), formerly a star quarterback and now a social worker, to eliminate any risk that she might infect him, as she herself was infected by a scratch from a rabid boat party attendee.

Liv conceals her condition from everyone, including her roommate and best friend, Peyton Charles (Aly Michalka). The only person aware of her zombie transformation, at least at the series' outset, is her new boss, Dr. Ravi Chakrabarti (Rahul Kohli), Seattle's chief medical examiner. The British-born coroner is enough of a pop culture nerd to be fascinated by a real-life zombie, but he's also enough of a scientist to be intrigued by the challenge of curing her. The sudden eruption of zombie-ism is traced to a freak combination of the latest designer drug, Utopium, with a popular energy drink made by the Max Rager Company. Complicating Ravi's search for a cure is the discovery that the Utopium sold at the boat party was cut with an unknown additive. The exact composition of this "tainted Utopium" becomes one of the series' core mysteries.

When Liv discovers that consuming a brain gives her fragments of the dead person's memories, she offers to help Det. Clive Babineaux (Malcolm Goodwin) of the Seattle P.D. in solving the homicides of the victims she autopsies and eats, passing off her insights as the product of psychic abilities. Though Babineaux is initially skeptical, he quickly adopts Liv as his unofficial partner when her information proves to be uncannily accurate. But along with the memories of the dearly departed on whom she dines, Liv also finds herself acquiring their skills and personality traits, making daily life a rollercoaster of multiple personalities for both Liv and those around her. One day she's a painter ravished by life's aesthetic potential, but the next she may be an emotionless contract killer, a pushy relationship counselor or a former Army sniper. The abrupt eruption of alternate identities into Liv's everyday life supplies much of iZombie's comedy.

While each episode revolves around a particular police case, the show also pursues series-long plot arcs. The central drama in Season 1 involves a charming sociopath, Blaine DeBeers (David Anders), who was the drug dealer supplying the tainted Utopium to the boat party. Like Liv, Blaine has been transformed into a zombie and, also like her, he has adapted his occupation to his new condition by selling brains instead of drugs. Blaine's clientele are people he himself has turned into zombies. Operating from a fancy butcher shop with the unlikely name of "Meat Cute", Blaine satisfies his customers' dietary needs by kidnapping and killing random victims, many of them runaways who frequent the youth center where Liv's former fiancé works. Late in the season, a second villain appears in the person of Vaughn Du Clark (Steven Weber), the preternaturally cheerful CEO of Max Rager, who may or may not know more than he lets on about the harmful side effects of the energy drink his company is peddling.

The potential for a zombie apocalypse remains a permanent threat, spurring Ravi's search for a cure and Liv's determination to stop Blaine from creating more zombies to expand his business. But as the season progresses, it turns out that covert zombie-ism is more widespread in Seattle than Liv initially thought.

Liv's hard-boiled narration of each episode is one of many deliberate echoes of Veronica Mars. Several former cast members from the earlier series make guest appearances, and their number increases in the second season. No one is more distinctive than Daran Norris' local TV weatherman, Johnny Frost, who first shows up in the pilot as the patron of a murdered call girl and then returns in episode 11, "Astroburger", to offer Liv a unique form of assistance in investigating the murder of a mental hospital patient. Norris, who played attorney Cliff McCormack in Veronica Mars, has a radio announcer's voice, and it's never been better used than in Johnny Frost's upbeat recitations of his Seattle-area forecast.

Despite being a series about zombies, iZombie keeps the blood and guts to a minimum. Except for an occasional morgue shot showing a corpse mid-autopsy, there's more gore on the Blu-ray cover than in the show itself, and the camera rarely lingers over viscera. As in Buffy, physical violence tends to be remote and stylized. Then again, as Veronica Mars routinely discovered, the damage done by emotional violence may take even longer to clean up.

iZombie: The Complete First Season Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Like most current TV fare, iZombie is shot digitally. The pilot's cinematographer was John S. Bartley (Bates Motel), with the remaining episodes photographed by Michael Wale (Continuum). The show's visual style tends toward the bright and cheerful, which lightens the dark deeds onscreen and supports the show's delicate balance of violence, brain consumption and sarcastic comedy. Much of the color palette appears to be drawn from the style of Michael Allred's original comic book renderings, which can be seen in the show's opening title sequence, where Liv's backstory is recapped in graphic panels. The Warner Archive Collection's Blu-ray presentation features a clean, sharp and detailed image free of noise or interference. Blacks are solid, whites are crisp, and colors are fully saturated, though not to excess.

WAC has mastered Season 1 of iZombie on three BD-50s, and the average bitrate varies depending on the content of each disc, ranging from a low of just under 24 Mbps to a high of just over 31 Mbps. I was hard-pressed to spot any difference in video quality among the episodes, all of which have received a capable encode.

iZombie: The Complete First Season Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

iZombie has a 5.1 soundtrack, which has been encoded in lossless DTS-HD MA 5.1, but the show's main audio element is dialogue, which is always clear, intelligible and accurately centered. The rear channels are used sparingly, mostly to provide ambiance and to expand the soundfield for the film's incidental scoring by Josh Kramon (another Veronica Mars veteran). The opening theme song, "Stop, I'm Already Dead", by Deadboy and the Elephantmen, has a suitably raw electric sound, and nearly every episode features theme- or mood-appropriate musical selections.

iZombie: The Complete First Season Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

Although this isn't strictly an extra, it's worth noting that each episode following the pilot is preceded by a recap ("previously on"). These segments are frequently omitted in the transition from broadcast to home video, and their inclusion here should be applauded.

• Deleted Scenes (1080p; 1.78:1): Listed by episode title.
• Disc 1
• Pilot (2 scenes) (2:00)
• Brother, Can You Spare a Brain? (0:35)
• Disc 2
• Flight of the Living Dead (1:34)
• Patriot Brains (0:22)
• Disc 3: Due to a mastering error, the two deleted scenes on Disc 3 are reversed, with each appearing under the other's title.
• Dead Rat, Live Rat, Brown Rat, White Rat (0:27)
• Blaine's World (1:49)



• iZombie: 2014 Comic-Con Panel (disc 3) (1080i; 1.78:1; 28:58): This panel followed a screening of the pilot episode. The participants are: creators Rob Thomas and Diane Ruggiero-Wright and actors Rose McIver ("Liv"), Malcolm Goodwin ("Babineaux"), Rahul Kohli (Ravi), Robert Buckley ("Major") and David Anders ("Blaine"). At this point, Season 1 was still in production. The panel discussion is lively and enthusiastic, with the cast and creators clearly excited by the show's potential.

iZombie: The Complete First Season Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Although I've seen my share of zombie movies, it's not one of my preferred genres, which is why I initially skipped iZombie, assuming it would be more of the same. I was wrong. As Thomas discloses at the Comic-Con panel included in the extras, he had indeed been developing a more traditional zombie show, but he shelved it when AMC announced The Walking Dead. Fate brought him back to the genre by a different route, and he and his co-creator did what they do best: make inimitably clever entertainment from unlikely material. While light on extras, WAC's Blu-ray set is a superior presentation of a show with a high rewatchability factor and is highly recommended.