Geekscape Interviews: Diane Ruggiero-Wright, Executive Producer of ‘iZombie’

“Shut up!”

Diane Ruggiero-Wright, the executive producer of the upcoming CW series iZombie, told me to shut up. Don’t worry, it wasn’t hostile. We were bonding, in fact. About, of all things, New Jersey.

Ruggiero-Wright is a prolific television writer and producer currently attached to iZombie, the TV adaptation of the graphic novel from DC Comics. She’s also from my hood in Middlesex County.

“Are you serious? I went to Middlesex County College for a year! That’s so funny.”

“So did my sister!” I tell her.

“I spent a ton of time in Edison. Do you remember the Ramada Renaissance Hotel?” I reply positively. Her earlier work, That’s Life, was based on her experiences as a cocktail waitress there and at the Park & Orchird in East Rutherford.

iZombie isn’t about that. It’s about a zombie, in case that was a little vague. But The Walking Dead this is not. Still, that show comes up in conversation.

“Do you watch The Walking Dead?” she asks me. I tell her I do, and that this past second-half season premiere “ruined me.” Fellow fans know why.

“I can’t get over it! It’s going to take me awhile,” she says. “The double-whammy is too much!” She carefully words things as not to spoil it, even though we had both seen it.

She radiates enthusiasm. Not only for what she does, but for the very world of it: television! It’s our cultural campfire, and in this current golden age it is not just better or well-made, it’s daring. It’s charting new territory not thought possible even just a decade ago. A 20-something zombie navigating through life? That stuff used to be for low-budget movies at your video store. Now, they’re on the channel that once housed Dawson’s Creek, and she oozes passion for all of it. It’s almost infectious. You can’t help but not get excited when she’s around, or even just talking on the phone.

Based on the graphic novel from Chris Roberson and Michael Allred, iZombie follows Liv Moore, a brilliant medical student with her whole life ahead of her until one fateful night transforms her into a zombie. Now working at a coroner’s office, she feeds off of brains to survive but soon discovers she can absorb the memories of the deceased, leading her to solving mysteries and homicides.

From the very beginning, what attracted you to iZombie? What led you to decide, “This show? I’ll do it!”

Diane: Rob Thomas sent me the comic, and I got the first book and went immediately like, “Yes.” It’s just such a great concept to have. It’s an interesting spin on zombies, I’m a huge fan of the zombie genre and [iZombie was] just such a smart spin.

When you’re a person in your mid-20s, you’re kind of having that pre-life crisis anyway, so that when you’re actually dead it’s just really interesting to me. So I was very much on board from the beginning. I actually said yes when he just told me the title! [laughs] He said, “They wanted me to do this show, iZombie.” I was like, “I’m totally on board. What do you need me to do?” And then I read it, and we talked and came up with our take on it. Our take on it came pretty quickly, we were both pretty excited from the get-go.

So the premiere is fast approaching. You’re marking those X’s on the calendar. Very plainly, just how do you guys feel? What’s going through your heads as team? What’s going through your head?

Diane: It’s so weird. I’m trying to be the naysayer. Because everyone else is so positive that I feel like I have to be all doom and gloom. Because it’s just gone so smoothly.

For both Rob and myself, we’ve been developing these passion projects for years that haven’t gone [anywhere]. And every year as you approach pilot season it’s this labor, you have this thing you’re in love with. And this is just so easy-breezy. They brought it to Rob, Rob brought it to me, we worked on it together, everything went really smoothly, and the pilot shoot went great, our cast was wonderful, and everyone is nice. No one is an asshole! [laughs]

So it’s really one of those things where you keep looking at each other, like the network has been great, the studio is amazing…

Everything is falling into place.

Diane: Yeah! So, it’s kind of, everything is just primed. You’re primed for success, so I feel like I have to be like, “Obviously it’s all gonna fall to hell.” [laughs] It’s scary! We’re just editing the penultimate episode. We’ve just finished shooting the finale.

Oh, wow.

Diane: It’s so hard not to have done all this work and have so much in the can, and not have any feedback from anyone other than your partners.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOONQw3tkZk

You built your career working on shows like Veronica Mars, Big Shots, and my mother’s favorite, Dirty Sexy Money. What has iZombie been like compared to working on those shows? In what ways has it been different or similar?

Diane: Not to be a jerk and correct you, but I actually built my career on other shows! I created a show, That’s Life, based on my life in New Jersey for two years. [But] doing Veronica Mars was extremely different because I had only written kind of about my life. Some semi-autobiographical stuff. But the difference with iZombie, it’s strange because once you work with Rob, like [how I worked] with Rob on Veronica Mars, we had such a good kind of rhythm. We were pretty good partners.

To work on iZombie with him was very familiar, and it was kind of great to get back into that rhythm. We have a very similar mindset. So when you do these other projects you’re out there on your own, and when you’re on someone else’s show you’re trying to figure out, you might not necessarily “get it” and it might not be your bag. But working with Rob, it’s pretty easy to figure out because we have the same bag. [laughs]

In regards to the original iZombie comic, what kind of liberties did you take from the source material? Or did you follow it to a T in any way? What influenced those decisions?

Diane: We took a lot of liberties. We were inspired by the graphic novel, but one of the reasons it was a great graphic novel is the reason that we couldn’t make it a great TV show and keep it the same. The things they did in the graphic novel that made it awesome, if you translate it into TV would mean a crappy TV show, because we couldn’t just do it well. They do it great in the comics, but we can’t just couldn’t do it on TV.

There was a character that was a “wereterrier,” so one of the leads turns into a wereterrier and I had friends that did Being Human and I know how difficult, how much money and how hard it is to do those werewolf scenes that they had to do. It’s just really hard to do it well on a smaller budget. You don’t want to sacrifice special effects for story, and we just knew it was going to be too big for us. We took the inspiration from the actual journey of the main character, but the other characters we had to kind of do away with to really be able to tell the story in a visually-appealing way on national television.

So it’s a case of why these mediums exist in the first place: Some things can only work for comics, some only for TV.

Diane: Exactly. And it’s funny, because those are the things that the ghost best friend and the wereterrier were things I loved about the graphic novel, but if we tried to do that in the pilot I wouldn’t have liked it. But it’s fantastic in the comic, I just don’t think it would have looked good. [But] we were inspired by the relationships, the people she goes to, it’s definitely the heart [from] the graphic novel because [graphic novel author] Chris Roberson is amazingly talented and he wrote a really great book.

iZombie clearly stands out from the rest of the DC Comics TV out now, and it’s almost surprising how many there are now. Were there any challenges in creating the “non-superhero” TV show?

Diane: To tell you the truth, there weren’t any challenges because we didn’t feel any pressure to make it like a superhero DC show. We just felt the pressure to make it the best version of our show we could. But there was no pressure to live up to a certain “ideal” of a superhero standard. There wasn’t anything like that.

It’s funny, we have this writer on our staff, Bob Dearden, who actually helped us — he helped us when we were breaking the pilot too. That’s a question he had asked us also. “This is a lot of pressure, this is a DC property!” But … we just kind of took it at story. And just concentrated on telling the best. Servicing the material as best we could with our spin on it and doing the best we could.

About Bob and the writers as a whole. As an aspiring TV writer myself, what’s it like inside the writer’s room? What’s a day in the office like?

Diane: Well the writer’s room is closed now, because we’ve stopped shooting. But we had a lot of baby writers and some seasoned vets, and not very many in the middle. [laughs] Kit Boss, who has been around and is unbelievably amazing and brilliant who was on Bob’s Burgers and is just a genius. And we have a lot of new, kind of staff-level writers who were just great. It was a nice mix.

A day in the writer’s room is pretty much something I don’t speak because I’m off writing. [laughs] I [have] become something of the “writer monkey,” once we go into production I’m more of the writer monkey and I’m off in my office writing while things are happening. Rob is a fantastic show runner, so it’s not one of those crappy writer’s rooms where you’re there from ten in the morning until ten at night. The hours are great, it’s fun, and we have a great deal of fun dissecting zombies and what to do with them.

I understand Bob Dearden had a great deal of buzz to him when he got on the show. He had his own web show on The CW Seed, Play it Again, Dick.

Diane: He’s great. He was a protege of Rob’s, [and] I thought, “Who is this guy?” And I read his first Dick scripts and they were amazing, and we became friends by then. But he had helped us so much working on the pilot, he had so many great ideas and he was such a great sounding board and then once we got into production, he was a writer’s assistant, but he was just so sharp and had such a great grasp of the material that we really started to look towards him for insight. I especially always pitch everything to Bob. He wound up writing an episode that came out fantastic!

He actually wrote a couple scenes for me on my last episode. We had a quick turnaround, and I thought “Thank God, there’s Bob, except he’s stuck in Vancouver!” [laughs] He’s fantastic.

As a fellow aspiring writer, I should follow in his footsteps then.

Diane: Exactly! The funny thing is, everybody asks, “What do I do to become…?” You have to write well. [laughs]

(In a later email, I asked about Bob Dearden’s situation. It struck me: why was he stuck in Vancouver? I had heard through sources he had some troubles getting back into United States. I sent an email and Diane responded.)

Diane: I wouldn’t so much say Bob “having trouble.” He’s just in the process of applying for a Visa. Apparently the application process takes a lot of time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8c0CQuX-QM

You have a great lead in Rose McIver.

Diane: Oh my God, yes.

She was great in Once Upon a Time and Masters of Sex, but for me personally, I loved her as Summer, the Yellow Ranger in Power Rangers RPM. In your opinion, how has she lived up to your expectations? Did she surprise you in any way?

Diane: She totally surprised me. She just puts a different spin on the ball. And it works. So there’s a lot of times you write a line and you hear it a certain way, and she’ll give it back to you and it’s a little bit different but it works on a level you didn’t even imagine. It’s kind of amazing.

She’s very smart, and she’s extremely witty and the thing about her, she’s unbelievably charismatic. People love her! From the second you start watching the show, you’re just so on her side. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced that before, where people universally want to protect her and want to be her friend.

On Power Rangers she was amazing. She was like everyone’s best friend.

Diane: Yeah! She’s your best friend, and she’s formidable, but you also feel like you have to protect her, but she’s not like this needy, weak girl. She’s not a damsel, but you still feel like you want to protect her even though you know she can take care of herself. It’s this weird combination, but I would pretty much kill for her in a second. [laughs] And Rose is lovely. She’s the nicest. I’m not even kidding. You could not find someone to say a bad thing about her. She’s the nicest, coolest, down-to-Earth, funny, like one of the boys but [also] one of the girls.

I’d love to meet her one day!

Diane: You have to!

As one of the show runners, what do you think iZombie is ultimately about? Thematically speaking? What is the heart and soul of iZombie that can speak to the audience?

Diane: I think the heart of it is the journey of coming to that point in your life where you’ve been working. When I’m in my twenties, once I get out of high school and college, and I be this thing that I’ve known I wanted to be my whole life, my life will be a certain way, and then getting there and realizing that it’s not. And life is completely different than you thought it would and [you’re] reevaluating the world and the way you think about the world and yourself. And that’s what’s happening to the Liv character in an extreme way.

Not only is she learning about the world and herself, she has the onus of trying to protect the world at the same time. So, I think that’s the cool story of our show.

As someone in that position now, I can completely relate.

Diane: [laughs]

iZombie premieres March 17 on The CW.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWCyqJv6q7g

Update: This article in its original form mistakenly named Diane Ruggiero-Wright as “Diane Ruggiero.” That error has been corrected.