Why Lowell Tracey Remains iZombie’s Best Love Interest

Zombies are always in, but the undead got a big pop-culture moment on TV in the 2010s. We’re looking at you, AMC’s juggernaut The Walking Dead (2010–2022). And you, too, Netflix’s delightfully demented horror-comedy The Santa Clarita Diet (2017–2018). Somewhere in the middle was iZombie, a murder-mystery-meets-zombie-drama-slash-comedy that ran for five seasons on The CW.

While it may not have been a blockbuster hit, iZombie found a cult following thanks to a winning combination of whodunits, laugh-out-loud gross-outs, and performances that were, for the most part, surprisingly heartfelt. The brain-eating series was created by Rob Thomas and Diane Ruggiero-Wright, with some light inspiration from the Vertigo comic series of the same name written by Chris Roberson and illustrated by Michael Allred. The show only stayed close to the original book for so long.

In the comic, the main character is Gwen Dylan, an Oregon zombie who earns a living by working as a gravedigger in Eugene. To keep her memories, Gwen needs to eat brains every 30 days. When she’s not working the graveyard shift, she has a ghost friend and a would-be crush in a local were-terrier that round out her trio of supernatural buddies, and as anyone who’s read one of Allred’s books can attest to, Gwen’s look is a patchwork of turn-of-the-millennium style references to old Hollywood horror and sci-fi.

Liv’s new zombie ability is that she gains the memories and personality traits of the victims she eats. As one might expect from a five-season TV show, the potential for new personalities is effectively infinite, and to her credit, Rose McIver imbues each of them with a sort of earnest sincerity that makes us love them all, even if it’s only for a few days at a time. Plus, every one of these victims offered a new opportunity for McIver to flex her acting chops.

So not only was Liv able to eat whoever’s brains she wanted, she could get into people’s minds as well, making her the perfect sleuth to solve murder cases with help from the brains she sampled to serve as leads for Det. Clive Babineaux (Malcolm Goodwin), who—at least initially—thinks she’s psychic. In addition to her day job solving crimes with Clive, Ravi is Liv’s secret-keeper and protector, offering her support and guidance while also getting a genuine kick out of her strange power transformations (well, mostly, it was kind of annoying when she got the brain of a PhD scientist… but that’s neither here nor there).

Brains, Bad Guys, and Bittersweet Goodbyes

Like every great murder-mystery show, iZombie needed a villain, and it found one in David Anders’ Blaine DeBeers. Blaine was the smarmy, sleazy dealer of tainted Utopium (referred to in the show as “blue candy”) who scratched Liv that night on the boat. When that part of the business gets a little slow, Blaine upcycles into a full-on brain trafficker, cultivating a class of rich and powerful undead clients in need of his life-saving goods.

Decked out in his trademark tuxedo, Blaine is the very definition of aristocratic douche, and the zombie with daddy issues and a crooked, yet somehow lovable, smile was a magnetic presence on the show. But he wasn’t the only one to steal the spotlight. Jessica Harmon, who joined the cast in season two as FBI agent Dale Brazzio, became a welcome addition to the regular team when she became Clive’s new partner. Bryce Hodgson’s comic relief performance as clueless frat boy Scott E. in season one was so well received, the writers reinserted him into the show two seasons later as twin brother Don E., the terminally loyal sidekick to Blaine.

Guest appearances from Daran Norris (whom many may know from his turn as Wesley Wyndam-Pryce in Buffy the Vampire Slayer) as sleazy, former murder-adjacent weatherman Johnny Frost and Steven Weber (who many will know from his work in films and TV series like Soapdish and Hawthorne) as Max Rager CEO Vaughan Du Clark (along with zombie daughter Rita, played by Leanne Lapp) brought one-off moments and ongoing bad guy arcs that fans still talk about today.

Despite some excellent early seasons and a faithful fan base, the final years of the show struggled with momentum. This was felt especially hard in the finale, which left many fans disappointed by its pacing and lack of closure. In many ways, the showrunner’s original pitch for iZombie as a strange but lovable “New Girl meets Shaun of the Dead” ethos was its greatest asset and its biggest hurdle. The weird made it special, but the weird was hard to scale to network proportions, as most TV fans know. The character performances, humor, and what one critic called its “gleefully grotesque palette” more than made up for the final chapter’s shortcomings, and in many ways, were what made iZombie stand out.

The Show iZombie Ate: “Flight of the Living Dead”

Fans of iZombie have a lot of favorite episodes and brain samples to pick from. But one in particular that resonates for us is the first-season standout “Flight of the Living Dead.” In the episode, Liv eats the brain of her free-spirited, free-loving former sorority sister Holly (Tasya Teles), who dies when she falls out of a tandem parachute skydiving “accident.” Holly’s nomadic zest for life gives Liv the gusto she’s been missing for a while, and as a whole, the episode is a joyride from beginning to end, a kind of turning point for Liv in her emotional arc and a reminder of iZombie’s underlying commitment to uncovering the humanity within the absurd.

Oh, and there’s also the zombies. Don’t forget about all the zombies, brains, gore, and bodies.