The Point Radio: Zombies Done Different On IZOMBIE

They aren’t your cable zombies, which might be what makes The CW’s version of the hit Vertigo comic, IZOMBIE,  so appealing. EP Rob Thomas and star Rose McIver talk about all the ways they strive to keep it both fresh and centered on the comic series. Plus thanks to the success of AMERICAN SNIPER, more Americans that ever are aware of the challenges facing today’s veterans. Now a new documentary explores that further and you can see it for free.

In a few days, we sit down with former HAPPY ENDINGS star, Eliza Coupe, and get a sneak peek at her new indy movie project. Be sure to follow us on Twitter @ThePointRadio.

Transcript

The Point Radio. Hey, it's Mike Raub. Of course you've seen the latest CW comic book hit iZombie. Rob Thomas and the series star Rose MacGyver are here to talk a little bit about how they keep it funny book fresh every week on the network.

Plus American Sniper showed us just a touch of what's going on with US veteran soldiers. Now a new documentary shows much more and you can see it for free. Let's get to The Point. This is The Point. The Point Radio.

Get The Point Radio. The latest successful relationship between the CW and the world of comics is iZombie. The Vertigo series created originally by Chris Roberson and Michael Ollie. It tells the story of a world with zombies that may have a few notable differences. Executive producer Rob Thomas.

The concept is live our hero as a functioning zombie and as long as our zombies keep eating brains they can continue to function. But if they were to go hungry they would slowly become, we're calling them Romero. The more traditional falling apart, becoming brain dead. So it goes a long time without eating brains.

You will start to be bald. And then there are the other zombie rules. When our zombies eat somebody else's brains not only do they get glimpses of memories but they actually take on some of the attributes of the people who they've eaten. So we're like in episode three Liv eats the brain of a sociopath and starts taking on

sociopathic tendencies much to her friends this May. And we'll have fun with that. We think this wouldn't be a hard and fast rule but in most episodes she'll probably get something good from the brain, she can send something, some bad traits as well. So much of the show's development still comes from the original comic series.

Show runner Diane Roguerio-Wright. And I was kind of amazed by things that we picked up on that are just little things that we didn't even realize. Like in the second comic how it starts in the lake and it's that flashback of Gwen with her friends and it's talking about the Indian massacre with the octopus monster.

And we didn't even, when we were coming up with the lake massacre we didn't even think that, we didn't even put together that we had read something with a lake. It didn't seem like oh let's take this lake theme and turn it into this zombie lake massacre. But there's so many things that are just connected that we find that it inspired us in different ways.

But I think the overall thing is just the feeling of a young woman being torn between the dead and alive and who is she and what is life like now. And that whole struggle is something we definitely need to play in. Of course there's a lot of great care to keep this show separate from the other zombies on TV.

As Rob explains. Yeah I mean I think we have to. You know something like The Walking Dead, a terrific show but we wouldn't be able to out The Walking Dead. We're on the CW.

We can't do a bunch of shotgun blasts to the head and have and you know and dial up horror enough on this network to make horror work. And I don't even think that it would be my personal or Diane's specialty. Like what we like, what both of us really like writing are dramas with some levity. And so I think totally we've been shooting for something closer to Buffy the Vampire

Slayer or Warm Bodies and it's going to be oddly a zombie show with heart and humor. One of the big differences is the fact that a heroine is a zombie yourself. Rose MacGyver who plays Liv. I think in choosing a zombie as a heroine there has to be something accessible for our audience.

We want to empathize with her and we want to understand her and if she was just an outright zombie villain there's no appeal at all. But I think we see, we definitely see her shortcomings and we see her tendencies and when she gets rabid and isn't able to control things. How she struggles with that.

But we also have the bad zombies. So we do have the other end of the spectrum. Blaine De Beers played by one of the David Anders is very much manipulating society for his game and he's able to take advantage of the situation in a way that we play with the darkness and the light.

And it's what I enjoyed about the subverting of zombie genres in general when I watched 28 Days Later and I felt like watching these families and these people decide what happens to this child and when it's grounded in some sense of normality or accessibility it's always an interesting kind of premise to me. So I think we have that and we have humour as well.

So it's a nice combo. As Rose points out Liv is faced with a lot going on in her world. I think it's like a heightened port-a-like crisis really. She's losing her sense of identity. She doesn't know.

She can't say that she's a medical student anymore. She can't say that she's engaged to be married to this guy. And it happens to us when we come out of school and we lose the framework that we've held on to. And so she tries to be a socially responsible zombie.

She eats the brains of people who've already died, very little. And I think she is able to find a sense of purpose and identity in bringing justice, restoring justice and finding the pillars of these victims. She had been a medical student so she always wanted to have some sort of community approach and now she's been able to find that as an undead which is rare.

And again Rose came to the project with a lot of respect for the source material. I mean the similarities from the, obviously the concept is from the graphic novel and it's great to have this whole plethora of resources that I can draw from and I look back through and she has the same sort of sarcastic sense of humour and pessimism that what Rob and Diane have done, smartly has been writing this TV show just to build an

arc throughout the season and develop where the show is going to go. She is starting to find purpose and that gives her a glomer of hope and a sense of optimism and so I'm really just playing with the idea of the rediscovery that we have in our early to mid-twenties and deciding what it is that you may want to do with your life. She's deciding what it is she wants to do with her life and it happens to be eat brains

and solve the murders. In the show Liv's nemesis is played by actor David Andrews. His name is Blaine De Beers. He's an entitled rich kid, drug dealer, sells a drug called Utopian. In the breakdown it said he's like James Spader from Pretty and Pink and I was like, well

I'm more like James Spader from Less Than Zero. So it's kind of in that, that's how I'm playing him. And you know as I said he becomes a zombie, did I say that? He becomes a zombie at the same time that Liv becomes a zombie at this big lake party and she's just like coming to terms with it and trying to figure out how to go about being

undead and she's figured out that she has to eat brains to maintain humanity and she's begrudgingly undead whereas Blaine is embracing it. So is it tough being another bad guy for David? No, I think playing bad guys is a lot of fun. Everybody has a dark side.

I'm lucky enough to have a job where I can tap into that dark side. And this is a new, this is a new undead bad guy. I'm playing on this sucker. Catch Eye Zombie, new episodes every Tuesday on The CW and you can always see more right now at Hulu Plus.

It's nothing but the latest. Here's what's going on in pop culture. It's the end for now for Downton Abbey on PBS, the UK's highest rated drama of the past decade and of course a massive hit for PBS all over the world. However the door is not closed on a possible big screen feature according to the producers.

They say they're contemplating something along those lines for the future. Disney Junior has optioned Fancy Nancy. It's a New York Times bestselling book by Jane O'Connor and Robin Glasser and it'll now be an original animated TV movie and a series to follow set to premiere on the network in 2017.

WWE Studios and Gene Simmons from Kiss have teamed together to produce a new picture outlet. It'll be called Arabist Pictures and it'll finance and produce horror films for the theater market. Right now the company has a three picture deal on the table with the first of the release being Matt Salivini's Temple which will be set to come out sometime in 2016.

The Eisner Award winning graphic novel I Killed Giants is headed to the movies. It has been adapted into a feature film or at least will be according to a recent report of The Hollywood Reporter. Treehouse Pictures is committed to fully finance the film. Kelly will be doing the script and will also attach to it as Anders Walder who won an Academy

Award last year for his live action short film Helium. Hulu has ordered ten episodes of a new series from the folks who did both Parenthood and About a Boy. It's called The Way and it follows a family within a controversial faith movement as they struggle with both relationships and power as well.

Writer for Parenthood Jessica Goldberg will also be a producer on the project. The History Channel is developing something called Nightfall. It's a series that chronicles the events surrounding the history of the Knights Templar, both the good and the bad days of that legendary historical group. It's being produced for A&E Studios.

Actor-producer Jeremy Renner is also attached to the project. The point, the point. Part of the success of the film American Sniper has been to shed even more light on the problem of post-traumatic stress disorder facing our American veterans. Another is a new documentary called That Which I Love Destroys Me from Rick Romanwall and

featuring among others American vet Jason Floyd. I asked Rick that with more attention on PTSD coming from American Sniper where this documentary fits in. Well, I think that the timing is a mere coincidence. I think it also has to do with, you know, what's happening with these wars winding down and

people and men and women returning in much more and greater numbers. But really our journey started back in 2007. I had met Jason and Tyler, the subjects of our documentary who are both special operations soldiers and a brotherhood instantly started with the three of us and they started confiding in me about how hard it had been for them to reintegrate into society, dealing with

issues of PTSD, you know, the isolation that they felt. But more importantly, how they were getting themselves through it by that no-quip mentality and finally breaking the stigma that many soldiers face of asking for help and leaning on each other and confiding each other what they were going through. And they really wanted to get that journey, that snapshot of their message out to their

fellow brethren because they knew it would help others. And that's how the documentary was born. It was about not having an oh, woe is me look at PTSD, look at me sitting on the sidelines of life. It was about this is how far we fell, warts and all, but this is how we got ourselves

out of the abyss and this is how we returned to active members of society. And I'm very proud to say that every screening that we've had, including the US Capitol in front of Congress, after seeing the documentary, at least one combat veteran has stood up and asked for help. So the guy's message is getting through.

Outside the documentary, are American TV and movies even close to portraying the problems faced by American vets? I asked Jason that question. Well, I think it's a matter of how you present the message. And the one thing that we feel separated our documentary from the current zeitgeist

and storylines that are out there right now is that it's truly told from our perspective. Rick was made a bold choice, got out of the way in a big capacity. And it's been our works, been our own actions. He gets in our lives and he shows you what this is and tells you what it is. So I think it's a matter of the trail of the current problem and struggle with PTSD.

But the one thing that we wanted to focus on the documentary is that there's also a solution to it. So what do we see in the film? Well, it was a really interesting phenomenon that happened because the guys at the beginning, we agreed upon what they wanted this to be.

It was about that message of showing their fellow warriors what they went through, talking about what they went through, and then also how they're getting themselves through it and not quitting on themselves ever, not once. But during the journey, we realized that their journey was still evolving. It wasn't over.

And that's something that I learned is I didn't have the honor of serving for our country. I'm a proud American and civilian. And I had the curiosity just like everybody else, and of course it was my job to understand them. And that's what I realized that was the fatal mistake we all make.

We will never understand what our warriors went through unless we had shared like experience with them, unless we were in combat with them. Our job is not to understand it. Our job is to not victimize them. Our job is to not demonize them.

It's to normalize. It's to know that the effects of war and how our men and women are returning and that PTSD can manifest itself in so many different ways, whatever it may be, it's normal. And to normalize that process with them and just support them, be there as a loved one, be nonjudgmental and help them through this.

Not only is the movie going to theaters, but it's also available for you online. Yes, online. We're trying to reach as many people as we possibly can right now. So we've got to stream in for free for this month on take part slash that. And we're just trying to get the message out.

We're also currently in the middle of a 10th city tour crossing out. Today it's trying to take it back and get some pizza. So after all this, what can an average citizen do to help? Well, I'll speak as an average citizen myself. You know, I think that one of the problems and again, that's why we're showing it on

take part dot com slash that for free is that so everybody can look at what's going on with our veterans and take some ownership of this journey, take some ownership of what's going on in our country. You know, you might be for these wars. You might be against these wars.

You might be on the left center, right aisle. Chuck all that to the curb. Our men and women didn't go over there for political reasons. They went over there selflessly to fight for our country. And now it's our turn to fight for them.

To normalize their process. If you're if you're if you're an employer, then employ our veterans, find them help find them work in the workforce. If you don't have any of those means and you don't even have any and you can't even afford to donate money, that's fine.

Go Google and find the support group in your area because support is free. We need to roll up our sleeves as Americans and get grassroots on this and stop blaming the politicians. Stop blaming the military and get get our hands dirty and get in this fight with them and help our soldiers return.

That which I love destroys me coming to selected theaters in a few weeks and you can see it for free right now at take part dot com. That's it for right now. But when we come back, we're bringing the lady who's entertained you in shows like Happy Endings, Benched and of course, Scrubs.

Elijah Koop talks about her new movie and we'll hear it first right here on websites like ComicMix dot com. Michael Davis World dot com. Get the point radio dot com and in the iTunes podcast directory. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook and of course, Instagram under the point radio.

And we'll see you right back here in just a few. Get the point radio dot com.