Date of airing: September 22, 2004 (UPN)
Nielsen ratings information: 2.49 million viewers, 1.8/3 in Households, 1.0/3 with Adults 18-49
written by: Rob Thomas
directed by: Mark Piznarski
VERONICA MARS was always one of my favorite television shows, despite the fact
that I never had much interest in it before it premiered, while it
aired, and after it was canceled. The premise is not much to win an
audience over with, and some of the characters are downright cliches of the
California beach high school genre, while the stories are not that
much interesting or thrilling, considering the crime procedural genre
they are placed in. After all, the cases the eponymous character and her
friends and father will be investigating are all soft crimes compared
to the murders and kidnappings the homicide detectives investigate over at CBS at
the same time. But VERONICA MARS is a show that lives (and judging by
the 2014 movie and the 2019 Hulu revival season, never dies) with its fun and
delightful attitude and its wonderful cast, headlined by a wonderful and
charming Kristen Bell, who was more than crush material for teenage
me back in 2005, when I discovered the existence of the show. Apparently she
was born to play the titular hero, and apparently Rob Thomas was born
to write this kind of female character, who is not just more than meets the eye,
but also puts the gender stereotypes of detective stories on its head,
while being the center of a stereotypical world that is filled with
detective stories. And all that after Thomas initially conceived the idea for a young adult teen detective novel that originally had a male lead character.
There is even a genre mix in this show – a teen high school drama that sometimes makes fun of its genre, and which dips into the noir drama for a few minutes here and there and makes fun of detective stories, VERONICA MARS is both a teen crime drama and a Whodunit detective show set in the modern world, following the rules of both genres (which could not be more different from each other), assuring the hopeful audience that this TV drama is not like any other. That should all promise fun, but for some reason, I was never wild about VERONICA MARS, and I was never obsessive about it when it premiered. Except maybe for a few days in the Spring of 2014 when the Kickstarter-funded movie premiered, and changed Hollywood for just a second (imagine what could have been if movie studios had allowed more actors and directors to follow that financing model). Yet here I am, considering the show as one of my all-time favorites, even though I have never rewatched the show during all of its existence. Will this rewatch change my connection to and emotional value of the show, and will I be more appreciative towards it? Am I about to realize that my teenage and Twentysomething mind did not catch all of the awesome weirdness that is VERONICA MARS?
 |
| Logan angrily throws his finger at his arch nemesis. |
Yes, Veronica Mars, high school student and teen detective, is not
much of a premise, since teenagers have already been detectives, police
officers, and even murderers on scripted TV, but it is the other premise (the high
school life of one Veronica Mars, who once had it all and is now on her
own) that mixes well with the rather sleepy premise of solving petty
cases in high school, and sometimes even a murder. It is basically Nancy
Drew set in the world of 21 JUMP STREET, but the writers figured how to
fill the show with even more stuff by looking at how previous high
school teenage dramas did it. Ten years of BEVERLY HILLS 90210, the
emergence of DAWSON’S CREEK, and the genre shows BUFFY THE VAMPIRE
SLAYER and ROSWELL all served as potential idols for VERONICA MARS, and I
do not blame Rob Thomas for doing it, because a) I do like all
these shows, and I would gladly watch and rewatch them (being a 1990s kid,
I have to confess I never saw more than the first season of BEVERLY
HILLS, 90210, and I cannot even remember what happened in seasons two and
three of ROSWELL), and b) it is up to some heavy-hitters of television
to create and write captivating female characters, with Veronica
essentially joining Buffy Summers, and, in a way, Sydney Bristow from
2001’s ALIAS, in the narrow field of women characters who know how to
handle men around them, and how to solve problems without the need to
cry for help.
This episode was pretty much just exposition on top of even more exposition. 41 minutes of introducing the characters, the world and the back story to the new viewers, all while trying to shoehorn in a contemporary story involving a newcomer to Neptune High, because there is never a TV show premiere with a character who serves as a proper audience surrogate, in this case Wallace, who is as much being introduced to Veronica’s world as we are. It is interesting how these 41 minutes managed to be captivating with all the exposition in each and every one of the minutes the show was running. Veronica needs to be established as a high schooler with a hobby as a private investigator. Veronica needs to be given an extensive and dramatic backstory in which she was raped. Veronica needs to be depicted as the clever young woman who cannot even be bothered by potentially dangerous-looking Latinos in a biker gang. Veronica needs to be introduced to new friends for her upcoming TV adventures. Veronica needs to be thrust into an ongoing case, which happens to involve the murder of her best friend. And all of this in 41 minutes? To quote Keanu Reeves: “Whoa.” It is definitely surprising that I never lost interest in the pilot, judging by all the heavy exposition it delivered.
Maybe it is a good thing then that most of the flashbacks were used as part of the greater narrative. The flashbacks essentially told a story about how Veronica turned from being part of the clique to the lone girl on the outside, how the murder of Lily Kane shocked not only her, but the entire town she lived in, and how it ruined her status with her peers. It tells a story of how she was secluded more and more, which was then being put over the top by her rape, and how she was treated by Sheriff Lamb in his office (hello patriarchy, turns out you really need to be kicked in the nuts by Veronica for being such a dick). It is almost like Rob Thomas realized he may have a few too many flashback scenes, so he decided to up the ante and simply tell another story within his story. Hey, as long as it helps to introduce the characters and the world to the viewers, why not?
The three stand-alone detective cases were not much of interest to me, even if they happened to introduce the supporting cast around Veronica. The big high school case introduced with Wallace hanging by the pole was just a way for Veronica to make some new friends and maybe get an assistant (and when UPN really was high on their non-success, they even would have asked Rob Thomas to make Veronica and Wallace a romantic couple), while the Jake Kane arc was thrown into the mix to show that there is more to the Kane family than just Veronica having dated Duncan and having befriended future murder victim Lily. And the Loretta Cancun case showed that Veronica can be Ethan Hunt for high school teenage dramas as well, and go to lengths to solve a case and save her friends, even when Weevil and his biker gang were not her friends in this episode, and even when it looked like Veronica and her contacts were kind of breaking the law to switch out the surveillance tape. Then again, throwing her into the biker gang ring was just one way to get Veronica some more friends. After all, Wallace is not the only one who started to like Veronica in a BFF-type way by the end of the episode, since Weevil might have found his match as well, and he might have liked that more than Wallace did.
 |
| Thumbs-up and fingerguns for a successful pilot episode. |
When it comes to the ongoing story (Lily’s murder), it seemed obvious that Rob Thomas wanted to stretch out the case as long as possible, to turn it into an ongoing narrative, to be solved and closed much later in the series arc. Even though information was given that the murder case is still being investigated by Keith, what Veronica thought about during the final third of the episode was her mother, and how she might be involved in the Kane family drama. It was like finding her mother and fixing her family was of a greater concern than realizing that the Lily Kane murder is practically still unsolved, which means Veronica needs to remove her fixation on her effort to fix her family, and turn her eyes towards her best friend’s murder. That is also an intriguing thing to do: Rob Thomas developed the main arc of the show with the help of exposition-heavy flashbacks, but paddled around this huge elephant in the show and created another ongoing arc that might overshadow Lily Kane’s murder for a bit and give the writers time to develop either story, and make it part of Veronica’s development. This is actually clever writing.
