The Main Character
There’s no denying that Liv and Veronica are ultimately pretty similar. They’re both overachieving, highly intelligent female characters, which are still a novelty on television today. Often times, we see these types of woman paired up with a male counterpart. If you’re coming into iZombie with a Veronica Mars background, there’s a reason Liv will seem familiar. Thomas has used the same character archetype in refining his iZombie lead. Liv clearly mirrors his earlier creation in terms of character traits – they’re both spitfires, that’s for sure – and you could even call them role models, in their own respective way. Neither of them are of the laying down and taking it variety, and that more than anything makes them compelling to watch. From the start, you want to see what they’re going to do next.
The biggest differences, besides the obvious ,Liv being a zombie and Veronica being completely of the living variety, are their demeanor and life stage. Pre-zombie, Liv is a perky perfectionist who has done fairly well for herself. She has an internship at a prestigious hospital, she’s engaged to a stable, good looking man, and she has what appears to be healthy relationships with friends and family. The one time she breaks character and goes to a party with a fellow intern, as part of an attempt to fit in a little better with her peers in what I can only assume is a stressful and competitive environment, she ends up at the mercy of an inexplicable zombie outbreak – her life changing experience. Following that incident she becomes a shell of her former self, but by the end of the pilot and in the following episodes (at least the ones I’ve seen so far), she starts to snap out of her bleak outlook on the rest of her life and finds a new purpose. She’s a hopeful character, in a very different way than what Veronica evolves into in season one.
As I mentioned, the Veronica Mars pilot also reveals Veronica’s life altering event. Except it’s not the murder of her best friend, it’s the decline of her home life as a result. When Veronica’s father, the sheriff at the time, goes after Lily’s father for the murder, her entire world starts to fall apart. Her boyfriend suddenly dumps her, her mother leaves, her father is run out of elected office, and for a teenager, her perspective is slightly more limited than Liv’s. That’s not to say she doesn’t possess an acute awareness for the pitfalls of life, it just means that even as a mature teenager, she’s still a teenager. And unlike Liv, who consciously makes a decision to follow a new path, Veronica’s in more so thrust upon her.