Before Ghosts, Rose McIver Starred In A Hit DC Comics Adaptation

"Ghosts," the cheerfully breezy CBS sitcom inspired by the BBC series of the same name, has a quirky tradition. The show, to quickly recap, takes place in an old manor that married couple Samantha/Sam (Rose McIver) and Jayanth/Jay Arondekar (Utkarsh Ambudkar) share with a menagerie of ghosts, whom only Sam can hear and see after a near-death experience. Almost every year, typically around Christmas, Sam and/or Jay are possessed by a ghost after being shocked (inadvertently or deliberately) by electricity and falling on them. Like much of its mythology, "Ghosts" wisely avoids digging too deeply into the "How does that work?" of it all.

Why bring this up? Because Sam tends to be possessed more often than Jay, and for good reason. As fantastic as Ambudkar is at channeling his co-stars' mannerisms and pretending their onscreen counterparts are possessing Jay, nobody excels at this particular style of acting (playing fictional characters who gain the attributes of other fictional characters) quite like McIver, as she proved for five seasons from 2015-2019 with her work on "iZombie."

Adapted from the DC/Vertigo comic of the same name (itself created by writer Chris Robertson and artist Michael Allred), The CW's "iZombie" series was developed and run by "Veronica Mars" creator Rob Thomas and Diane Ruggiero-Wright, a writer/producer on the latter show who also co-penned the "Veronica Mars" feature film. With bonafides like that, you may not be surprised to learn that "iZombie" centers on Olivia "Liv" Moore (McIver), a young blonde woman who, like Veronica Mars, takes to a career investigating crimes after a traumatic event upends her former life. But where Veronica is a sleuth in the hardboiled noir detective tradition, Liv is a plucky zombie whose brain-munching allows her to solve murders ... though there's more to the show than that.

Liv, as "iZombie" reveals, became a zombie under mysterious and bizarre circumstances, forcing her to abandon the promising life she was building. Luckily, having gone to medical school, she's able to thereafter snag a job as a coroner's assistant at a medical examiner's office. This, in turn, gives her access to human brains (which she has to chow down on to avoid becoming feral) without having to kill anyone. Meanwhile, to the outside world, it appears that Liv merely suffered some sort of quarter-life crisis.

Snacking on already-dead people's brains also imbues Liv with fragments of their memories while causing her to adopt aspects of their personality, which she uses to help the authorities figure out who killed the murder victims that make their way through her workplace. However, because Liv only absorbs these memories and personality traits temporarily, "iZombie" isn't a variation on the Ship of Theseus thought experiment where its hero's actions literally alter her mind and, thus, her sense of self. Instead, it's an off-beat procedural that evolves into a story about whether being a zombie is essentially an alternate lifestyle that can be ethically sustained. That's the sort of conceit that would make even the grandaddy of the zombie genre, George Romero, raise an eyebrow.

More generally, "iZombie" is just an entertaining series where Rose McIver showcases her acting prowess by pretending to be Liv while she's afflicted with the colorful personalities of the brains she's eaten. Further aiding the cause are her co-stars, which includes the likes of "Reacher" fan-favorite Malcolm Goodwin and an overwhelmingly charming Rahul Kohli prior to becoming a trusted member of Mike Flanagan's troupe. It's trickier to track down nowadays, but most major digital platforms carry "iZombie," should you find yourself craving a taste.