Why Rob Thomas’ ‘iZombie’ Ended Happily and ‘Veronica Mars’ Didn’t

Meredith Jacobs August 2, 2019, 1:15 pm

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for the series finale of iZombie, “All’s Well That Ends Well,” and Season 4 of Veronica Mars.]

And they all lived happily ever after — for the most part. (Sorry, Blaine and Don E.)

The fact that Liv (Rose McIver), Major (Robert Buckley), Peyton (Aly Michalka), Ravi (Rahul Kohli), and Clive (Malcolm Goodwin) were all alive (relatively speaking) and happy at the end of the iZombie series finale might have surprised some fans especially after watching the Veronica Mars revival on Hulu.

But the creator of both series knew that he could give his CW characters those endings because of the genre. “I’ve always known that, hey, I’m not doing a noir show for once,” Rob Thomas told Entertainment Weekly.

By the end of iZombie, Ravi had been able to make a cure, which led to the end of the war. Those who chose to remain zombies were able to live their lives in the rebranded Seattle — including Liv and Major, married with zombie orphans, though the world thinks Liv is dead.

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Ten years after that battle in Seattle, Clive and Dale (Jessica Harmon) were still married and in law enforcement, operating as co-captains in San Francisco, and were raising their kids (including Michelle’s son). Peyton and Ravi were married, with Peyton a district attorney in Atlanta and Ravi the Head of the CDC.

And as Liv playfully offered when she and Major caught up with their friends after a virtualcast, they could always join them on Zombie Island. “All it takes is a scratch,” she said.

(The CW)

But the end of the fourth season of Veronica Mars didn’t have the same tone. Though its main couple, Veronica (Kristen Bell) and Logan (Jason Dohring), also got married, the groom was killed soon after.

“With Veronica Mars, because I imagined that show was going to go on and we were going to continue to do more mysteries, I wasn’t building that as the grand ending of the series, whereas I was on iZombie,” Thomas explained. Though he had thought the Veronica Mars universe could have ended with the movie (which was why he gave it “a reasonably happy ending”), that’s not the case anymore.

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“It’s only now that I’m starting to believe I’m going to get the opportunity to do a bunch more [seasons of Veronica Mars] that that happy ending didn’t work for me moving forward,” he added.

That does mean there probably won’t be an iZombie spinoff or revival down the road. “I don’t think it’s going to happen,” Thomas admitted, though he’d “be game to work with [the actors] any time, anywhere,” whether that’s on a future iteration of the dramedy or another project.