Veronica Mars

When our daughter mentioned the Kickstarter-funded movie Veronica Mars the other day, I sighed and said we'd add it to our Netflix list, even though I'd avoided the sixty-some episodes of the Veronica Mars television show, which she'd devoured when they were originally broadcast. Allie quickly waved me off the movie: the TV show is apparently a hard and fast prerequisite to fully understand the character interaction. So we hunkered down to start watching this series about a spunky blonde girl and I discovered it's actually pretty good. Picture Sam Spade being channeled by a seventeen-year-old high school girl in a California coastal town split firmly between the very, very rich Haves and the working-class Have Nots. Our heroine is also the daughter of the town's former sheriff, who was run out of office for failing to solve a high-profile murder. Solving that murder becomes the McGuffin for season one, since both Veronica and her father, now a private investigator, are convinced the guy who confessed didn't do it. The second season begins with the school bus returning kids from a field trip driving off a cliff on the Pacific Coast Highway into the sea. What actually happened and why? I was completely sucked in. 

        Having solved the second season bus-crash mystery with a death-defying finale on the roof of the luxury hotel in town, we leapt into the third season with Veronica heading to college, and a series of events that are complete mish-mashes.  I believe the showrunners were attempting to throw everything and the kitchen sink into the mix in a setup for the fourth season.  While the individual episodes are interesting, the whole falls flat.  To make matters worse, the show wasn’t picked up for a fourth season, so the show doesn't end so much as cliff, and we were left dangling. (Yes, some of this is resolved in the movie, which I'll review next, but it's still frustrating.)

I was hired when television was desperate enough to scrape the top of the barrel.

     --- Gore Vidal