Olivia Moore was a successful doctor who led a seemingly perfect life and had been very straight-laced and put together. That is, until one night on a boat changes everything as a club drug causes a random and concentrated zombie attack. She wakes up in a body bag and begins to live her life as a new zombie that includes quitting her job (and jumping off the successful track according to her mother), breaking off her engagement to Major, and decides to start working at the morgue, where she has complete access to something she craves now in her zombie form…brains.
As she seemed to be adapting to the unmotivated zombie lifestyle, things get a little more interesting for Liv as her new boss, Ravi, discovers her secret and takes a keen interest in how her body functions. The best part of this developing relationship is that it doesn’t seem like an exploitative one—well, at least for now—but rather, a mutually beneficial one. Throughout the hour, Liv and Ravi meet and help rookie homicide detective, Clive Babineaux, who like many cops on other shows is reluctant for outside help but then sees exactly how useful a person like Liv can be to an investigation.
Her expertise went beyond being a “psychic” though, as she let her zombie instincts loose and became enraged and managed to stop their suspect even after crashing a car, getting shot at and thrown from said car. Must be a perk of being a zombie.
Through it all, we got to see bits and pieces of her home life and how disconnected she’s been from her mom, best friend, and ex-fiance since the zombie attack five months before. You just can’t help but feel for her in the situation as we get a glimpse into her head, thanks to the voiceovers, and see that Liv is just trying to make sense of what her life is now.
As we get introduced to her world and the people that surround her we begin to get a hint that she’s fighting her way back to life and that makes for an interesting start to the series and really endears you to Olivia. Being a Rob Thomas production, I was excited to see that the voiceover style was pretty much the same as it was during Veronica Mars: informative, insightful, and not completely distracting.
The amount of familiar faces that popped up in the first hour felt like a tour through shows of the CW past, from Robert Buckley to Aly Michalka, both of which we don’t really know much about except for their connection to Liv.
It was refreshing to see a bit lengthier opening credits as well as transitions that lent itself to the kind of comic-book based show it seems to want to be. Not to mention, the credits and transitions were pretty cool.
I’m looking forward to seeing more of Liv and how she fights to recapture that bit of herself while adapting to life as a zombie. And of course more of David Anders next week, hopefully, as we just saw enough of him in the pilot to note that he was the one responsible for turning Liv.
So, what did you think of the pilot? How many familiar faces were you able to spot? What did you think of the zombie protagonist?