There’s a neat trick - first suggested, as far as I can discover, by the American academic Rebecca Johnson - for identifying a passive construction in case of doubt. Try adding ‘by zombies’ after the verb. If you can do so, you’re looking at the passive voice.
‘Everyone loves by zombies The Great British Bake-Off’ is recognisably not English. ‘America’s Got Talent is loved by zombies’ is not only a grammatical sentence, but probably true.
One of the reasons that passive constructions can seem unwieldy, though, is that they add an extra layer of abstraction between subject and verb, particularly if an agent is involved. You always get an auxiliary verb and - where the agent is identified - the particle ‘by’ (as in ‘by zombies’) entering the construction.
