Based on the DC/Vertigo comic, The CW's iZombie tells the story of a young woman, Liv (Rose McIver - Power Rangers RPM, Masters of Sex), who has reluctantly become one of the recent undead. To feed her cravings for brains, she takes a job a morgue, discovering that absorbing the grey matter allows her to see the final memories of murder victims.

Executive producers Rob Thomas (Veronica Mars, Party Down) and Diane Ruggiero Wright (Veronica Mars), along with McIver and the rest of the cast, recently fielded questions at the Television Critics Association press tour and spoke about the difference between iZombie's undead and those on AMC's The Walking Dead, and how McIver's Liv might compare to the iconic Veronica Mars character.

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Rose McIver as Olivia "Liv" Moore in iZombie.

The iZombie cast and creators at the TCA press tour.

Rose McIver at The CW's 2015 Winter TCA Session for iZombie.

"We didn’t hew terribly closely to the source material," Thomas admitted. "In the iZombie comic book, there’s a whole monster universe. There are were-terriers and ghosts. We wanted to stay strictly zombie, so we only have zombies in the show. And we really needed a story engine. We wanted to do a case of the week show. In the comic book, the main character is a gravedigger and that’s how she gets her brains. By making her an assistant medical examiner and putting her in the morgue, it gave us our case of the week that we wanted."Thomas then elaborated a bit more on the traits and quirks Liv adopts whenever she eats a person's brain. "One of the big elements that we did retain from the comic book is the idea that when she eats brains, she gets the memories of the dead people," he said. "That was one of the big selling points in the comic book. And then, when we started getting into the writers’ room and talking about whether she’s going to inherit the talents of the people that she ate, there were lively and lengthy discussions about how far do we go with that. If she eats the brains of someone who knows karate, is she a karate expert for the week? In the pilot, she eats the brains of someone who speaks Romanian. Can she do that this week? And at the end of the day, we decided it was just more fun to say yes to those things."However, once Liv consumes a new brain, the old traits vanish. "Our logic is if she eats a new brain, that the stuff from the previous brain is gone," Thomas clarified.Star McIver -- who's appeared as Tinker Bell on Once Upon a Time and on Masters of Sex in the past year -- opened up about the role and about getting a part where she, essentially, gets to play different characters depending on whose brain Liv eats. "I feel like as an actor, that was always why I started out doing this, is I wanted variety and I wanted to be able to play all these different characters and live a whole bunch of lives in one," she said. "So it’s kind of the dream job in that sense where I’ve been able to try my hand at all different styles and characters and actual genres. I mean, we combine so many things in this show. It’s great. It really is variety."In the hardened world of AMC's The Walking Dead, zombies don't exist as a thing characters know about - from movies, TV, or books. It's not even a word anyone uses. But that's not the case on iZombie. "It wasn’t a part of the comics, but it was something that we really enjoyed about the show," Ruggiero-Wright revealed. "Because it is so prevalent in pop culture that we’re having a lot of fun with the fact that that’s where [Liv] does her research. If there were a zombie attack, what would you do? I would watch The Walking Dead and see you could pick up a lot of useful tips. So I think that’s one of the best parts of the show to me, is that they know zombies exist. They can make jokes about it. They reference it, and it was an easy decision because it was the most fun."But does that mean that the zombies on the show will always be pretty? "If [Liv] didn’t eat, she would decay," Ruggiero-Wright continued. "If we locked her in an elevator for a month, she would start to look like a regular zombie."Thomas expanded on that, saying "In Episode 3, you see an example of what happens to one of our zombies if they don’t eat." He added that if Liv didn't continue to feed on brains, "She would be a Walking Dead-style zombie - or what we in the show call a 'Romero.'"I was just thinking that The CW was really wanting to do something different and thought that they might have a show with some attractive people," Ruggiero-Wright joked.Both Thomas and Ruggiero-Wright of course are known for Veronica Mars, another series with a formidable female lead. But how might Liv differ from Veronica, zombie-ism aside? "I think that Veronica’s hardened," Thomas said. "I always wanted us to sort of, at our best in those voiceovers, strive for this very Raymond Chandler-esque, hard boiled, cynical world view. And I think Liv and iZombie is more naturally a softer character. It’s part of the journey for her is return to sweetness and light and finding things in life that are worth going on living for. So while we are using that [voiceover] technique in both, I think their attitudes are pretty different when we’re writing that VO."

iZombie premieres on Tuesday, March 17th at 9/8c on The CW.Additional reporting by Eric Goldman.Matt Fowler is a writer for IGN. Follow him on Twitter at @TheMattFowler and Facebook at Facebook.com/Showrenity