‘iZombie’ is a bit of a mash up between a great comic book and a screenwriter who didn’t seem to want to use all that much of the source material. Here’s showrunner Rob Thomas on the actual direction that the show will follow.
What was it about the comic book [iZombie] that appealed to you?
Rob Thomas: I, actually, I’ve been interested in zombies for awhile. In fact, my tragic zombie story is that a few years ago I spent a few months developing a zombie apocalypse show that I was going to take out and pitch. We were literally scheduling those pitches when the front page of Variety said, “Frank Darabont sells Walking Dead to AMC.” They were so similar. What they did was so similar to what we were doing, it just killed that project. So, I put zombies on the back burner for several years. The head of Warner Bros. development came to me with this comic book and asked me to develop it. What she said was, “CW needs another great female lead on the network.” They need another Buffy; they need another Veronica. And she puts the comic book on my desk and says, “This is it, this is the one.” But at the time, I was editing the Veronica Mars movie; I had already sold a couple pilots. I said no, and she wouldn’t take no for an answer. She kept coming back to me and finally she just won that war. I said “OK I’ll write it.”
I was always excited about it creatively. I just felt like I didn’t have the time or energy, but apparently I did. Actually what i did was I brought the Diane Ruggiero to write it with me, who I’ve worked with so much. That got me over the month.
Are we going to have inner zombie monologue on this?
Yes, yes we do. There will be inner zombie monologue. Definitely.
Does she have any good signoffs that you’ve already picked up on?
That’s always, I think that’s the fan’s work. And I’m excited to see what they’ll do with it. There should be plenty of room for fun fan interaction on this.
This is more like Buffy than it is Veronica, can you elaborate on that a little?
What I meant to say was that I think iZombie is more like Buffy than Veronica Mars was like Buffy. Veronica was very real world. There were no monsters in it. There was not a lot of action or violence in it. iZombie will have a bit more of that. Veronica Mars, we were really serious about trying to write great mysteries and spending a lot of our beats and story points on that. I think on iZombie, we’re going to spend a little more time trying to get to fun zombie moments. We don’t want it just to be a “zombie solves a murder case,” each week. We want there to be a real, zombie mythology and zombie story lines. I would say in Veronica Mars there was always a big murder case that encompassed the season. In iZombie, there’s a big zombie storyline that will sort of serve as the same role.
Like the cure?
Yeah!
That’s pulling from zombie rules. What are your hard, fast zombie rules for iZombie?
Well our zombies, when they eat brains they inherit the memories of the brains they eat. They also get some of their traits. So in week three [Liv] eats the brain of a sociopathic, and she becomes a bit sociopathic. In the same episode she also eats the brain of a trivia champion and suddenly sounds like Cliff Clavin over the course of the episode. Generally, she’ll get one kind of good trait and one difficult trait each episode. If they stop eating, they quit functioning and they start turning into the more prototypical slow-moving, dumb-witted zombies. And we kind of have everything they sort of start at functioning then kind of slink back into more World War Z, and if they keep eating they become slow moving and we call those “The Romeros.” The Romero zombies.
Via: io9.
