Sunday, January 16, 2011

'Veronica Mars' Season One (2004)

Starring Kristen Bell, Enrico Colantoni and Percy Daggs III
Created by Rob Thomas

Veronica Mars: The Complete First SeasonI don't endorse teen dramas lightly.  The majority of them are vapid, soap-opera trash.  But every so often one of them comes up with a twist, and coupled with some excellent writing that goes beyond your standard "Dylan slept with Kelly this week OH.  EM.  GEE."  "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" was one of those, taking standard teen drama tropes and wrapping them up in a funny and charming supernatural universe.  When that show ended, I wasn't sure there'd ever really be anything like it.  The CW's "Supernatural" takes care of part of it (guess which) but what about the other?

That show is "Veronica Mars."


Veronica Mars (Kristen Bell) is the teenage daughter of Keith Mars (Enrico Colantoni), a private detective in Neptune, California.  A year earlier, Veronica's best friend, Lily Kane (Amanda Seyfried) was murdered.  At that time, Keith was the Sheriff of Neptune County, but was run out of office when he implicated Lily's rich and powerful father Jake (Kyle Secor) in the murder.  Neptune is essentially split into two zones: the rich and powerful "09" zip-code, and everyone else.  The "Oh-Niners" as they are referred to are the school's elite, which used to include Veronica, since her father was an important town figure, as well as Duncan Kane (Teddy Dunn), also Lilly's brother and Veronica's girlfriend, Logan Echolls (Jason Dohring), Duncan's best friend and Lilly's boyfriend.  Logan is the son of Lynn and Aaron Echolls (Lisa Rinna and Harry Hamlin, married in real life and on the show).  Aaron is a powerful Hollywood high roller, having starred in dozens of films.

On the other side of the tracks is Veronica's (pretty much only) friend Wallace (Percy Daggs III) now that she's been shunned along with her father. There's also Eli "Weevil" Navarro, leader of the PCH biker gang.  The new Sheriff, Don Lamb (Michael Muhney) is an incompetent glory hound more interested in making headlines than in actually solving cases.

Veronica works as her father's assistant, and moonlights herself as a private detective for hire at Neptune High School.  Not long after being shunned by her friends and schoolmates, Veronica attended a party where she was drugged and raped, further destroying her reputation for good.  She must figure out a way to infiltrate that high-class world she's been ejected from in order to solve her friend's murder.  The list of suspects is long, and the evidence starts to obliterate the alibis of those closest to both Veronica and Lilly, the danger also mounts for Veronica and her father.  Who murdered Lilly?  Who ran Veronica's mother out of town and is now threatening her life?

So, I have a confession to make, and it's really kind of nerdy: The first time I watched this first season of "Veronica Mars," I watched the entire 22-episode season in a single weekend.  But it doesn't end there... because I've just done it again.  There's an upside to the fact that I've pretty much been laid out in bed all weekend, and it's totally coupled with the fact that "Veronica Mars" is goddamned addicting.

What makes "Veronica Mars" just so plain awesome?  It's a mixture of a lot of elements that just click.  Firstly, the cast.  Kristen Bell is dead sexy and full of sass, easily capable of exuding both strength and vulnerability when the script calls for it.  She delivers a sarcastic wit with a cut like a Japanese ninja sword.  The show's entire emotional core rests on her, and it works beautifully.  Equally important is how well she works with her father, and Bell and Colantoni pull it off with flying colors.  Their frustrations with each other are believable, but just as charming, if not more so, is how much the two characters clearly care about each other.  After being abandoned by her mother, Veronica and Keith realize that they're all they've got for each other.  Their bond, regardless of what happens between them, is unshakable for any great length of time.

The other cast members are good, but not quite the revelation that Bell is.  Jason Dohring is hilarious as mean-spirited rich-kid Logan Echolls.  He clearly enjoys having his status, but he also hates being in the limelight, and his relationship with his parents is strained, at best.  Percy Daggs is fine as Veronica's long-suffering friend Wallace; he has good comedic timing, but sometimes he can seem flat.  Oftentimes, the Wallace character functions as little more than a go-fer for Veronica, so it's good when the focus returns to the fact that they are indeed friends.

The show's structure follows Veronica as she gets closer to solving the case of Lilly's murder while also solving standalone cases at school.  This allows the show to explore a number of other themes throughout the season, mostly focusing on the class struggles between the elite Oh-Niners and everyone else.  Veronica will get involved in cases including a teacher impregnating a student, voter fraud during class elections, stolen poker money, missing fathers, and more.  Sometimes the mysteries can be a little to predictable, sometimes you wonder why it seems so hard for Veronica to solve them, but for the most part, it's not a problem.

Part of what makes "Veronica Mars" so enjoyable is its fresh grafting of noir tropes onto a modern-day teen drama.  Veronica herself is the hard-boiled detective, operating in a world full of femme fatales, nefarious criminals, snitches and more.  She narrates each episode with her learned sarcasm, navigating a Neptune that is sunny and seemingly happy by day, but a dangerous, neon-lit world by night.  It's an incredibly satisfying fictional universe these writers have created, one that's easy to get lost in.

"Veronica Mars" is funny, fascinating and quite worth your time.  I've roared through this first season in a single weekend, twice now.  If you're looking for a show with engaging characters, a great cast and a razor-sharp wit, you'd be hard-pressed to find one better than "Veronica Mars," even if (like me) teen dramas usually bore you to tears.

11 comments:

  1. I can go one better. I've watched all of Season 2 this weekend, and I'm already one disk into Season 3. I really have no idea why I didn't finish the series three years ago.

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  2. Aaaand...I'm already on the third disc of Season 3. VM really is a fantastic show that was killed well before its time. Considering the film noir aspects of the show, I love the details in Keith's office - the rotary telephones, the ancient metal-bladed fan, the milk-glass pendant lamps, the stained-glass windows...

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  3. It's cancellation is a damn tragedy. The show was actually showing improvement in the ratings when the CW decided not to renew it for a fourth season.

    Have you ever seen "Brick"? Not that they're the same, but that's also a very interesting take on a noir tale set in a high school. It has Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who's excellent.

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  4. I have not seen "Brick," but if you recommend it I'll have to take a look.

    As I said before, at least we got three years of VM - unlike poor Firefly.

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  5. Can't argue with that, but I feel like I could've done with two more years of 'Veronica Mars'. Five seasons, culminating with perhaps Veronica opening her own business or taking over Mars Investigations entirely.

    One of the things that strikes me about the character is that she's learned everything about being a detective from her father, and as good as Keith Mars is, she may in fact be even better than he. I think that would've been cool to explore in a final season.

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  6. Didn't they already explore the "Veronica is a better detective than Keith" thing in the first three seasons? After all, Veronica was the one who succeeded in solving Lily's murder. Rob Thomas has talked about making a movie set several years after Season 3 wherein Veronica has joined the FBI, but as far as I know that project is pretty much dead.

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  7. Veronica often went behind Keith's back during her investigations, and since she was without a doubt the focus of the show, she would be the one to solve the case. But I don't think we saw a mystery that Keith couldn't have solved on her own, or that she couldn't have solved without his help. But I think, more specifically, it would've been interesting to explore it as a way of having Veronica literally overtake her father, using it as a metaphor for her adulthood or something, and leading into a finale that sets her up as a detective in her own right rather than as her father's assistant or doing it as a side job during school.

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  8. The Lily Kane murder was given as the reason that Keith was ousted as Sheriff and his great frustration in not having been able to solve it. Through her personal relationships Veronica obviously had some access that Keith didn't, but she still figured it out where he couldn't.

    Off to watch the end of Season 3.

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  9. And I do agree that they could have done some very good stuff with it as her abilities became more publicly acknowledged and accepted. I still see her going into law enforcement ahead of PI work, at least to get her career going and build contacts.

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  10. I dunno about that... I mean, the idea of her going into the FBI or something is cool and all, but she'd grown to have such a distrust of law enforcement because of Lamb and authority figures in general that it sort of rung hollow for me. Veronica was excellent at circumventing law enforcement bureaucracy in order to get justice that I don't believe she'd ever accept working under the kinds of restrictions they'd place on her. Now, maybe that could be a storyline for a season, but I don't see Veronica being anything other than a private detective.

    And, then, perhaps, writing a series of books and getting fabulously rich for it.

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  11. I'm conflicted. While I would have loved to have seen many more seasons of this great show (and in some of the S3 commentary Rob Thomas says that his plan was always to have VM in the FBI), the final scene of S3 was an absolutely perfect Film Noir moment. Veronica walking off into the rain, knowing everything is going to hell around her despite her best efforts - as an unintentional series finale moment, it worked perfectly.

    On that note, if you haven't watched the S4 presentation on the last disk of the S3 box, it's almost depressing to see how awesome it could have been.

    And yes, I agree that she would have eventually done the right thing over the bureaucratic, legal thing and been bounced out on her ass - but that would have been a great storyline in itself.

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