Wow, the already-dead Vertigo comic iZombie is hardly like the hit CW show it unleashed

iZombie--the first CBS procedural outside of Elementary that fortunately doesn't feel too much like "a Dad show" (it airs on the CW, a joint venture between CBS and Warner Bros., so that qualifies it as a CBS show)--was one of network TV's most pleasant surprises last season. I don't care for the "Dad show" writing of most procedurals, and the case-of-the-week structure that's such a fixture of those procedurals initially made me doubtful about latching onto iZombie when it debuted. But the farcical and mildly supernatural elements iZombie added to that structure--like how whenever assistant medical examiner Liv Moore (Rose McIver), a zombie who must snack on brain matter to keep herself from going full zombie, wolfs down a murder victim's brains to grab clues from the victim's memories, she also absorbs the victim's personality traits--immediately won me over as they freshened up a walking corpse like the tired case-of-the-week format.

What's a Dad show, by the way? It's any procedural with an alphabet-soup title. The forensic heroes in these interchangeable procedurals quip a lot but aren't all that compelling when Daddy takes their one-liners away. It's "keep it on in the background while folding laundry" TV that doesn't require so much attention from exhausted, pooped-out and drowsy dads who find Mr. Robot or Rick and Morty to be too taxing for the brain or too morally ambiguous as light entertainment. It's fast food TV.

Criminal Minds is particularly shitty and unwatchable: it plays into every 92-year-old Fox News viewer's fears about how the world outside his door is going to hell in a handbasket. It fetishizes serial killers and is full of everything I despise about both the serial killer genre and torture porn, so it bugs me that smart comedic performers like Paget Brewster and Aisha Tyler have attached themselves to a dour, pretentious and repugnant show that's so beneath them. And I know the Asian American blogosphere worships the modern-day Hawaii Five-0 because the show gives juicy roles to Asian American actors--sure, as an Asian American, that's a nice thing to see--but I otherwise don't understand the worship: Five-0 is essentially another right-leaning Dad show from CBS.

Loosely based on a comic DC's Vertigo imprint published from 2010 to 2012, iZombie is, like any other CBS procedural, full of forensic experts who quip and often drop geeky pop-culture references, but it's far from a Dad show. The sharp writing and not-so-dour-and-pretentious sensibility of Veronica Mars creator Rob Thomas and frequent Veronica Mars writer Diane Ruggiero-Wright, iZombie's showrunners, are among the reasons why iZombie never feels like I'm spending a week inside the mind of a 92-year-old Fox News viewer. The elderly murder victim whose racist personality traits Liv acquired in "Grumpy Old Liv," the second-season premiere, is clearly Thomas and Ruggiero-Wright's way of mocking the 92-year-olds who eat up Criminal Minds or CSI: Cyber.

iZombie may be imbued with the DNA of Veronica Mars--Liv is the same kind of plucky detective heroine who, during Veronica's run, captivated fans of neo-noir, feminists, feminist fans of neo-noir and neo-fans of noir feminists--as well as the DNA of what Ruggiero-Wright has cited as the part of The Matrix where kung fu skills are uploaded into Neo's mind, but a bit of Orphan Black seems to have also been slipped into the show like the chunks of brain matter Liv slips into her lunch. The show is a weekly acting exercise for the New Zealand-born McIver--and she's been killing it, whether as an immature frat boy, an extremely sensual artist, a stoner who talks to imaginary friends or, this week, a melodramatic, stiletto-obsessed "Real Housewife of Seattle"--like how the scenes where Tatiana Maslany has to play either a clone impersonating another clone or a clone impersonating another clone impersonating another clone are a crazy exercise each week for Maslany.

It also features the best ensemble on a Thomas show since Party Down. There isn't a weak link in the iZombie cast. Sure, Detective Clive Babineaux (Malcolm Goodwin), the Seattle cop who turns to Liv for help on his cases, is a tad underwritten as an audience surrogate, but he's an effective foil to both the personality changes Liv experiences (Clive has, like the Santa Barbara Police Department on Psych, been led to believe her visions stem from psychic abilities rather than zombie ones) and the morgue humor of Dr. Ravi Chakrabarti (Rahul Kohli), the supervising M.E. who keeps Liv's zombie side a secret from the rest of the police.

As drug dealer Blaine DeBeers, the now-former zombie who got high on his own (tainted) supply of a drug called Utopium--the cause of the underreported emergence of zombies in Seattle--and was responsible for Liv's transformation into an Undead American, and Vaughn Du Clark, a narcissistic energy drink magnate who's perhaps even more ruthless than Blaine, David Anders and Steven Weber, respectively, are the best kind of villain for a show based on a comic: they're blessed with comedic timing, but their performances are also carefully modulated and they're never prone to treating the material like camp or pantomime. Anders' turn as Blaine, the machinations of Blaine and the downward spiral of Major Lillywhite (Robert Buckley)--Liv's amusingly long-suffering ex-fiancé--from idealistic social worker to completely broken, Utopium-addicted killer of zombies are key to why the non-procedural half of iZombie is rarely "keep it on in the background while folding laundry" TV.

Before penning YA novels and creating shows with both passionate cult followings and unfortunately short life spans, Thomas was a member of several Texas rock bands--which is funny because people who aren't familiar with his TV work frequently confuse him with Matchbox 20 singer Rob Thomas, so his past as a musician in Texas hasn't exactly helped to distinguish him from the Matchbox 20 guy--and his not-so-hackneyed tastes in music led to a lot of well-chosen existing songs on Veronica Mars. Those same tastes have also been integral to the existing song choices on iZombie. The show opens each week with a great forgotten tune, "Stop, I'm Already Dead" by the now-defunct Deadboy & the Elephantmen. The scoring work of regular Thomas show composer Josh Kramon is equally solid, like whenever it emphasizes the primal nature of Liv's zombie side with just the use of percussion.

Professional hat tip to #iZombie music supervisor Kasey Truman for Stop I'm Already Dead http://t.co/V2G6dklyUP @DaxRiggsFans @chopshopmusic

— Joel C. High (@cre8ve_ctrl) April 3, 2015

Party Down, "Constance Carmell Wedding": "The Holo-what?"

This weekend's second-season finale of one of my current favorite shows, the Starz single-camera comedy Party Down, is rumored to be the series finale. The show's chances of being renewed by Starz have dimmed because it was a project that was nurtured by higher-ups who are no longer part of the channel staff, and they've been made even more dim by sucky ratings, as well as Party Down star and co-producer Adam Scott's decision to not return for another season (he became a regular on Parks and Recreation) and the decreasing availability of some of Scott's co-stars due to more stable employment opportunities that have emerged from pilot season. If Friday's finale was the last we see of the losers at Party Down Catering, it was a nice way to go out.

If you've never seen the underwatched Party Down, it's an uproarious and cynical portrayal of dog-eat-dog Hollywood, told through the eyes of cater-waiters who moonlight as actors, stage moms or underemployed screenwriters when they're not serving hors d'oeuvres to douchey showbiz bigwigs or the "blonde-haired nobodies with perky tits and bad skin" that Patton Oswalt encountered in one of the greatest things he ever wrote, a blog post about his miserable experience at an L.A. gifting suite (which I luckily saved to my computer before it was deleted from his blog). In other words, Party Down is the anti-Entourage. It's the darkest and funniest sitcom about not making it since Taxi.

The You Offend Me You Offend My Family blog does a wonderful series of posts called "Movies That Should Have Starred Asians." Party Down isn't a movie, but it belongs on that list. It's about failure and underemployment in Hollywood, and nobody's had it harder in that town than Asian American male actors, who have been stuck with some of the most demeaning roles in the biz. The one question I've had about Party Down throughout its run has been "Why is this group of struggling actors and screenwriters missing an Asian guy?" Now that the regular cast is without Scott (who's been terrific as Henry the lost soul and disillusioned actor who can't escape being recognized for his beer commercial catchphrase "Are we having fun yet?") and possibly Ryan Hansen, I'd be pissed if Party Down's yet-to-be-determined third season doesn't fill one of those empty spots with an Asian guy. (John Cho's without a TV series again. He'd be perfect on this show.)

Viewers who hate inside-showbiz sitcoms like Entourage or are tired of them will be relieved to know that not every episode of Party Down is about Hollywood (when HBO was initially interested in picking up Party Down, they pushed the creators, who include Paul Rudd--yes, that Paul Rudd--and Veronica Mars mastermind Rob Thomas, to make the project more of an inside-showbiz sitcom like so many other HBO shows, and the creators balked at having to recycle that exhausted genre, so Party Down ended up at Starz instead). In some eps, bumbling team leader Ron (Ken Marino, who along with Hansen, is one of many Veronica Mars alums who reteamed with their old boss on the new show) and his cater-waiters have found themselves working non-Hollywood functions like a young Republican club meeting or a college football star's NFL draft day party.

The show's versatile settings (and the rich material that arises from the waiters' reactions to each different setting and their encounters with the strangers they would mingle with) are among my favorite aspects of Party Down. The fact that the changing settings are really the soul of Party Down also means the show can never go stale, and it can survive the departure of a regular like Scott or Jane Lynch, who was an invaluable part of Party Down until she had to leave to join the cast of the surprise hit Glee. (Lynch's shoes have been ably filled this season by Megan Mullally as Lydia, an always cheery stage mom from outside of Hollywood whose lack of knowledge about the industry, pop culture or sexual slang like "cougars" and "bears" have resulted in some great reactions from her youngest co-workers, Martin Starr's self-described "hard sci-fi" screenwriter Roman and stand-up comic Casey, played by Lizzy Caplan, whose unexpected farewell to clothing in True Blood is the only reason to watch that show.)

In "Constance Carmell Wedding," Lynch reprises her role as Constance--a '70s/'80s starlet whom you might barely remember from such Skinemax mainstays as Scream Weaver, Walnuts and Dingleberries--and who's now a client instead of one of the waiters of Party Down Catering, which she hires to cater her wedding to an elderly movie producer (an initially unrecognizable and sickly-looking Alex Rocco from The Godfather and The Friends of Eddie Coyle). The inevitable meeting between Constance and her replacement Lydia does not disappoint. Seeing Lynch and Mullally share the screen while their characters compete for attention from the Party Downers is like watching one of those Doctor Who eps that unite the current actor who stars as the Doctor with a previous actor who played him, except the Doctor now has a vagina.

The element I missed the most during season two due to Lynch's absence was the dynamic between Constance and Hansen's not-too-bright actor/supermodel/skirt-chaser/wannabe emo rocker character Kyle, whom Constance was often seen giving muddled showbiz advice to. Constance's interaction with this male version of her younger self--they look alike, and at times, they even think alike!--made Kyle the seemingly douchey pretty boy an even more likable character than bitter nerd Roman, whom we were tricked into sympathizing with early on in the series until we realized, "Damn, Roman is a worse asshole than the assholes he snarks about." (In a couple of nicely underplayed dramatic moments during a first-season ep, Kyle saw a group of potential drinking buddies ridicule Constance behind her back, and then he ditched them to hang out with Constance, an applause-worthy move that's a great example of the show's unpredictable and nuanced writing and must have won over viewers who thought Kyle would be a rehash of Hansen's douchey Veronica Mars character Dick Casablancas.) The finale revisits this dynamic in a hilarious wedding reception scene where Kyle and his emo band perform a song about struggle that could have been the perfect Party Down opening theme if it weren't for certain lyrics. Kyle doesn't realize his lyrics are repulsing Constance's older Jewish guests ("Yeah, they brand you a star/Put you on the midnight train/Going very far/Line you up and give you a number/Shoot you down/Throw you away/We will not surrender!") until Constance has to interrupt him to point out the questionable imagery, to which Kyle replies, "The Holo-what?"



The finale also reaches a pivotal point in the arc of a duo that's even more interesting to watch than Yoda and Luke Runwaywalker, mostly because of the chemistry between Scott and Caplan: Henry and his equally sharp-witted, on-again/off-again girlfriend Casey, who landed a bit part in a Judd Apatow movie and has been attempting to pull Henry out of his disillusionment with acting. Since it's Scott's final ep as a regular (or if the show gets axed, it's the final ep for everybody), this often downbeat show ends with a rarely seen ray of hope when Casey becomes so distraught over getting deleted from the final cut of the Apatow flick that she... nah, if you have a PC and a Netflix account, you have to go stream the finale now to see for yourself.