Executive producer Rob Thomas has confirmed what fans of the Vertigo series probably have already deduced from the flurry of casting announcements: The CW's iZombie pilot will deviate significantly from the source material by Chris Roberson and Mike Allred.

"We're not sticking that close to the comic," the creator of Veronica Mars tells IGN. "The thing that we're taking from the comic is this mid-20s female zombie who eats brains and gets the memories of the dead, but we put her in a coroner's office, so there is sort of a 'case of the week' each week where she gets snippets of memories of the deceased and tries to solve the crime."

As Thomas' comments underscore, the CW project is being billed as a supernatural police procedural, with Rose McIver (Once Upon a Time, Power Rangers R.P.M.) starring as Olivia “Liv” Moore, a med student-turned-zombie who teams with the medical examiner and a police detective to solve murder cases to silence the voices in her head.

"What the studio and network asked for, they want a new sort of 'cool' female lead on The CW," Thomas explains to the website, "they want something in the vein of Buffy or Veronica Mars, so they asked me to write in the tone that I normally write in. It will not be Zombie Apocalypse Show, it will be sort of fun, cool, smart, funny -- a single-female lead who happens to be a zombie."

TheWrap reports the project has filled out its regular cast with the addition of relative newcomer Rahul Kohli as Dr. Ravi Chakrabarti, an enthusiastic nerd with a brilliant mind who becomes Liv's friend, partner and confidant. He joins McIver, Nora Dunn, Malcolm Goodwin, Rahul Kohli, Robert Buckley, Alexandra Krosney and David Anders

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