‘iZombie’ Is At Its Best When Poking Fun At The Genre It So Clearly Reveres

If we’re being honest with each other, it’s high time we admit that zombies have pretty much had their day. From 28 Days Later to The Walking Dead, these lurching, ravenous brain eaters have scared the living daylights out of us for far too long, and now it’s time for a reimagined version of the undead to take over. Thankfully, we don’t have to look very far for a new and improved V.2.0 as iZombie recently launched its fourth season. The CW dramedy is everything you never knew zombies could be: irreverent, hilarious, and more human than not—that is, aside from the whole “needing to feast on brains so they don’t turn into the nightmare-inducing version of themselves” thing. It is, simply put, the best thing that’s happened to zombies since, well, possibly ever?

What’s so refreshing about iZombie is its insistence at poking fun of the genre it so clearly reveres. Showrunner Rob Thomas (Veronica Mars, Party Down) isn’t trying to reinvent the wheel here; he’s just using it a little differently to move in a different direction and explore new territory. The general conditions are the same: if you’re attacked by a zombie, you become one, and once infected, you have an irresistible desire to eat brains. From there, the show makes up its own rules. For one, becoming a zombie doesn’t automatically mean stalking the street in a stupor, eyes red and teeth gnashing. In fact, so long as the zombies have regular brains to eat, they’re pretty much their old selves. The major difference in the iZombie world forms the crux of the show and is what makes it so damn irresistible: zombies temporarily take on the personalities and mannerisms of the brains they eat. The results, as you can imagine, are always a delight.

Based on a comic book series of the same name, iZombie features a motley crew of characters both zombie and human, all of whom are delightful in their own ways. While Liv (Rose McIver) pulls double duty working alongside Ravi (Rahul Kohli) at the county coroner’s office and solving crimes with Detective Babineaux (Malcolm Goodwin) of the Seattle PD using the brains of victims she ingests at her day job, Liv’s ex Major (Robert Buckley) is busy pounding a superhuman energy drink known as Max Rager and working to keep peace between the zombies and the humans (a nearly impossible task, at this point).

That is, of course, an extremely simplified version of events, one that doesn’t include some other pretty stellar supporting characters, including Liv’s still-human BFF Peyton (Aly Michalka) and the sometimes-undead conman Blaine (David Anders), largely responsible for the initial zombie outbreak due to his sales of tainted Utopium. If this all sounds a little crazy, you’re not wrong. That’s exactly why it’s so much fun and so compulsively watchable.

Despite its more fantastical elements and numerous moments of slapstick humor, iZombie is also a show with a lot of heart. We might laugh out loud at Liv taking on the personality of a deceased dominatrix or Major turning into a bratty teenage girl after ingesting her brain, but the human element is never lost on our characters, even if their physical humanity is. Big picture concepts like friendship, loyalty, and love all play important parts in the show, with the deeper connections between our characters serving as grounding moments that heighten the funny stuff and keep the whole show honest.

Exploring zombieism in this way—as an unfortunate side effect of an as-now incurable illness rather than the apocalyptic horror show featured in most other pop culture representations—gives iZombie endless potential. Sure, Ravi’s working on finding an antidote to the zombie virus (and he may even do so eventually), but where other zombie shows are focused on an end goal—eradicating the undead and restoring humanity seem to be the most popular—Thomas’s concerns are a little more down-to-earth. Sure, Liv would like to be human again, but it’s literally not the end of the world if she doesn’t. In fact, it sometimes seems as if she’s OK with things just the way they are. Maybe that’s a coping mechanism, but in the iZombie universe, there are fates worse than brain-eating for the rest of your life, believe it or not.

There seems to be at the core of this show (and in the cult following surrounding it) a sense of joy in turning the old-school zombie genre on its head and making it something new, something a little more quirky, a little less gory, and a whole lot more fun.

Jennifer Still is a writer and editor from New York who cares too way much about fictional characters and spends her time writing about them.

Watch iZombie on The CW