The Strain, iZombie make for some terrifying TV viewing

As a rule to live by, "I'll try anything once" has stood me in pretty good stead. But while I have sampled many wild and exciting things over the past 40-odd years (gin and prosecco, white water rafting, chocolate-covered crisps), there are quite a few experiences I fear I will not be able to squeeze in before I croak. Buzzard dust, durian and those freaky ear piercings you can poke your finger through are just gonna have to be missed, I'm afraid.

While God (or whatever omnipotent, omnipresent entity you believe in) only knows what's around the corner, I'm pretty sure that brains, especially those of the human variety, aren't going to be on the menu anytime soon. I'm quite content to leave the cranium snacking to medical student Olivia Moore, protagonist of light-hearted supernatural drama series iZombie, which premieres tonight at 9pm, on Warner TV.

Sweet lil Liv (above; Rose McIver, Once Upon a Time) was on the fast track to a perfect life until she attended a party that was gatecrashed by flesh-fancying human corpses and woke the next morning to find herself half-zombie. With a sexy new heroin-chic look, Liv takes a dead-end job at the city morgue to gain access to the brains she must, rather reluctantly, eat to survive.

But, of course, there are side effects worse than acquiring a muffin top to Liv's new diet. With each brain she consumes, she experiences flashbacks of the dead person's memories, including, at times, clues as to how they were killed. Liv's eccentric boss encourages her to use this "gift" to help crack murder cases. From the creator of Veronica Mars, Rob Thomas, and based on characters from the Vertigo comic of the same name, iZombie is about as deep as The OC but, wisely, it doesn't attempt to be a diluted Walking Dead. It's fluffy, dry-humoured fun with a ridiculous premise and it isn't half as annoying as it should be.

If creepy undead action leaves you craving more pant-wetting scares, then look no further than Mexican fright-monger Guillermo del Toro's latest offering. The Strain (TVB Pearl, Wednesday at 10.30pm) - a title around which I have imagined a whole new reality show, featuring contestants with very poor diets - is based on a comic book trilogy co-authored by del Toro (it was his writing debut) and crime writer Chuck Hogan.

A plane lands in New York with all but four of its passengers having mysteriously died. Epidemiologist Ephraim Goodweather (Corey Stoll; House of Cards) is sent to investigate, only to discover some serious evil lurking in the cargo hold. A nasty parasitic, skull-crushing evil. The Strain has all the elements of a classic horror B-movie: terrible acting, hokum dialogue and predictable plot set-ups, its story only really held together by a crazy vampire-hunting professor (David Bradley; Game of Thrones), who knows precisely what kind of trouble Stoll is about to unleash.