By: Anne S. Hall

Staff Writer

iZombie, the new hit television show on The CW, was featured in the arena of the Anaheim Convention Center for WonderCon 2015 Saturday afternoon.

As seats quickly filled up, the audiences cheered wildly as Rose McIver, Robert Buckley, David Anders, Malcolm Goodwin, Rahul Kohli and co-creators Diane Ruggiero and Rob Thomas took the stage. The team of talents was very comfortable together and stated that working on the set was very much like a family environment. The entire gathering was focused on the crew’s past careers and how they relate that to their present work on iZombie.

The series adaptation, which is loosely based off of Chris Roberson and Michael Allred’s 2010 comic series “iZOMBIE”, caught the attention of more than just the readers. The show is filled with suspense and mystery as the original story takes a twist starting with the main character Liv Moore (Rose McIver) working at a morgue helping with police investigations for homicides rather than tramping through grave sites looking for her daily slice of brains.

Instead of focusing too much on the backstory of the characters, the series started right where Moore transformed into a living zombie and viewers are fed tidbits of her personal past life and the love she lost with Major Lilywhite, played by Robert Buckley. Giving up her fiancé in fear of turning him into the living dead was a hard sacrifice as Major is portrayed as the all around nice guy, but there has to be more to the story since the writers keep him around, right?

David Anderson played the dubious Blaine DeBeers, whom you can decide to love or hate. As his past performances in shows like Once Upon a Time, The Vampire Diaries, Arrow and so much more, his mellow persona had the bad hitting you like a ton of bricks before the good guys ever saw it coming. Yet, there was always the tragic past not far behind explaining his evil nature and making you wonder whether to pity him, despise him or love him for trying.

Truly, the panel didn’t give much away about the script or the future plans of the show. CW scheduled iZombie to run for 13 episodes and thousands of viewers are already hooked.  Just four episodes into the season and so much has already happened. Moore fought with herself over the loss of Major and the people around her that knew and loved her most while DeBeers already revealed so much of his true nature.  Detective Clive Babineaux made it very clear that he has become accustomed to having the forensic duo helping him on all his case investigations as long as Moore takes a bite out of every being on the examining table to taste a piece of their last memories in order to put the puzzle together and find their killers.

The first episode started out pretty slow for me, but by the second episode and the revelation of the true villain of the story, I was hooked. The writers have done a great job of making the characters’ personalities so relatable to the audience and the murder mystery plots are entertaining for anyone that likes solving puzzles.

In the panel McIver was asked what the most difficult part of the show was for her as the main character.

“I think that the most challenging part of portraying Liv has the task of taking on the persona of the character herself, and then spending each episode taking on the persona of the person’s brain I’ve eaten. Since my character takes on the victims personal traits every time she gets a new brain, it’s not enough that I spend months adapting to the character of Liv, but in a number of days I get to challenge myself by adapting to the characteristics of each episodes victims,” McIver said.

Truly, I’m not sure that I’ve seen any other actor take on such a task in any other television show in history. Definitely not for every episode made. Even when a performer has taken on a different person in other performances, the original character is lost and potentially returns.  Moore’s character is forever changed and learns and grows more so as the undead than she did as a living human. It took her loss of life (supposed anyway) to appreciate all that she denied herself the opportunity to experience while she was a member of the living.  Something that too many people often make the same mistake of doing.

See how Moore changes and whose brains become her next meal/inspiration on The CW at 9 p.m. every Tuesday night. If you’re going to San Diego Comic-Con, don’t miss their panel, as they will be present at that convention as well.