Don’t worry, iZombie producers Rob Thomas and Diane Ruggiero are working hard to improve the taste of their brains.
“You can’t make silk purse out of a sow’s ear,” star Rose McIver said of the “Japanese gelatin” that makes up the (supposedly) edible, fake brains her character eats in each episode. So maybe that’s a creative hurdle the show has yet to clear, but it appears to be only one of the few.
Both the “sizzle reel” and the panel that followed were full of the kind of fun energy inherent in a procedural where the lead character is a zombie who eats brains to solve crimes. Which is to say, the actors seemed to genuinely love their show and the people they work with in the least phony way possible.
So when Robert Buckley made crack that he’s only good at delivering cheesy one-liners, Thomas and Ruggiero delighted in making him eat his words the way older siblings “lovingly” press your face in dog shit (“You think our writing sucks?…”). Buckley wasn’t able to completely pull the foot out of his mouth until Thomas’ sudden exit to “catch a helicopter out of here.” An excellent power move, which also had the virtue of being true.
But before dropping the mic from said helicopter, Thomas promised “a big bang” for the forthcoming season two finale. “I just finished a cut of the finale…it’s huge,” Thoms said. “It dwarfs last year’s finale. Most of the seasons questions are answered and we tee up what comes next.”
Not to be outdone, Ruggiero settled the age-old question as to whether zombieism is a sexually transmutable disease. “There are Z-STDs, but it doesn’t make you a zombie,” Ruggiero said, pausing briefly before clarifying, “but it does make you itch.”
Sex was oddly omnipresent on a panel for a show about dead people, possibly down to a forthcoming episode that has McIver’s Olivia eating the brains of an exotic dancer and inhabiting her “characteristics.”
“To look sexy while you’re dancing is difficult,” said McIver. “It was just me with a bloody sponge trying to groove on the table.”
Yeah. Not sexy at all.
iZombie airs Tuesdays 9/8c on The CW.
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