- calendar_today August 21, 2025
From Dominatrix to Dungeon Master: Liv Moore’s Funniest Brain Shifts
Zombies are one of those pop culture staples that have always maintained a significant place in our collective imaginations. The ‘Dead aren’t Dead?’, but in the 2010s, they enjoyed a particularly big boom on television. The decade saw enormous zombie successes like The Walking Dead (2010–2022) and small experiments like Netflix’s horror-comedy mash-up The Santa Clarita Diet (2017–2018). iZombie, an uneven supernatural procedural dramedy, falls firmly in the latter camp. While never a breakout success, the show did maintain a cult following that appreciated its snappy wit, likable characters, and bizarre hybrid of episodic crime procedural and ongoing zombie mythology.
Our heroine, Liv Moore, was played by Rose McIver. A bright-eyed medical student with a rocky past, her life was thrown into chaos when the boat party she was attending was turned into a zombie massacre. The outbreak was caused by a toxic combination of the energy drink Max Rager and a bad batch of the designer drug Utopium. Scratched by a zombie while escaping the party, Liv awoke in a body bag on the beach the next morning, undead and craving brains. She ended her engagement with her ex-fiancé Major (Robert Buckley) to keep him safe, drifted apart from her BFF Peyton (Aly Michalka), and took a job at the medical examiner’s office as a way to keep herself supplied with brains.
Her boss, Ravi Chakrabarti (Rahul Kohli), immediately noticed the changes in Liv. Where most people would have reacted with terror, Ravi, who had been fired from the CDC for pointing out just such a possible virus, was fascinated. He immediately became determined to cure her and refused to let her quit the job, even after her undead status was revealed. Liv also became partnered with Detective Clive Babineaux (Malcolm Goodwin), who was under the impression that she was a psychic. The reality was a bit less glamorous – when Liv ate a brain, she would also get flashes of the victim’s memories along with certain personality traits. The memories have ranged from the useful (foreign language fluency) to the hilarious (phobias from the peanut butter addict who caused Liv to fear creamy spreads to the OCD germophobe who made Liv violently allergic to cotton) to the deadly. The detective and Liv are often able to use these pieces of evidence to crack the murder cases they work on, as the solution to the mystery is often revealed in the memories she acquires.
Brains, Villains, and the Show’s Unforgettable Characters
Like any good drama, iZombie needed a really good villain. Blaine DeBeers (David Anders), the brain-eating zombie who turned Liv in the season one premiere, was the perfect villain to hate and, as the show progressed, sometimes love and root for. A dealer of tainted Utopium before the events of season one, Blaine later took to supplying brain-eating zombies as a way to make a living. By infecting the rich and powerful for a fee, Blaine’s goal was to create a regular customer base who would come to depend on him. Blaine was a fascinating mix of the charming and deadly, along with a large helping of self-inflicted family tragedy, which made him an interesting recurring foil and sometimes grudging ally for Liv.
A whole host of colorful supporting characters were also introduced throughout the show’s run. Dale Bozzio, played by Jessica Harmon, went from being an FBI investigator to being Clive’s new partner. Bryce Hodgson was initially brought in to play Scott E., a memorable mental hospital patient in season two, before being brought back to play his twin brother, Don E., as part of Blaine’s operation. Special guest appearances by Daran Norris as sleazy weatherman Johnny Frost or Steven Weber as the Max Rager CEO, Vaughan du Clark, only added to the fun. Rita (Leanne Lapp), Vaughan’s spoiled young daughter, found a particularly gruesome end after she was allowed to devour Vaughan’s brains in the season two finale, in true zombie movie fashion, after going “full Romero” before dying herself.
Possibly the most reliably fun aspect of the show, however, was Liv’s randomly assigned personalities from the brains she ate. The women of the week or month, or in rare cases the entire season, have included a dominatrix, a curmudgeonly old man, a treasure-hunting archaeologist, an amateur LARP professor, a motorcycle-riding cop, a wheelchair-bound reporter, a kids’ basketball coach, and a make-up obsessed YouTube star. McIver, a chameleonic performer, was able to give each of these characters her distinct flavor, which was as often heartwarming as they were hilarious. Sometimes the brain was just for a gag or comic relief, such as Lowell eating a gay man’s brain right before a date with Liv, or Liv, Blaine, and Don E. developing a friendly bromance over a shared conspiracy theory after eating paranoia-inducing brains.
The series did fall off a bit as it aged, the murder mysteries especially treading thin in the final seasons, and the final season, ordered in haste, was less satisfying for fans and the creative team. However, the charm and cleverness of the whole operation, from the funny puns to the thoroughly realized characters, have kept it firmly on fans’ televisions and in their hearts. iZombie proved that even when zombies are everywhere, there’s always room for one more tasty brain-chomping crime fighter.
