I want to be friends with Veronica Mars.
I haven’t known her very long, and I realize that she’s not a real person, but she’s fabulous and fantastic. And I can’t get enough of her.
Over Winter Break, a friend lent me a copy of the first season of “Veronica Mars” on DVD. I’d been wanting to see it for a while because so many people talk about how great it is, and I was way excited to finally watch it.
I watched the pilot episode and instantly fell in love. It’s about a girl (Veronica Mars, duh, played by Kristen Bell) who lives in a fictional town called Neptune, Calif. She works for her dad at his private investigation business, and on the side, Veronica does her own investigative work. She’s a teenage detective of sorts, kind of like Nancy Drew but more original and way more up to date. And prettier. She’s got a witty comeback ready for everything, and though she’s not the most popular kid in school (in fact, she’s probably the least popular), she’s the kind of girl everyone would love to be friends with. She’s an outcast, and she’s always lamenting high school life, which is something that everyone can associate with at some point in life. Her idea of dinner is an ice cream sundae. That’s my kind of girl.
The show is dripping with humor, wit, drama, intrigue and plenty of atmosphere. It’s everything that a high school detective show should be, and it makes a hell of a lot more sense than that movie “Brick.” In the midst of it all, the show tackles tough, grown-up issues like rape, murder and the divide between the “haves” and the “have-nots.”
In addition, “Mars” has solid writing and acting, and the season-long mysteries are complex enough that I can never figure them out before the season’s end.
Veronica is so good at solving every mystery that if I ever had a problem (and if Veronica were actually a real person), I would turn to her for help. I’d corner her in the bathroom like everyone else does and pay her ridiculous amounts of money to help me. It sounds sketch, but it’s not.
I gobbled up the first season during winter break, and finished it just as the break was coming to a close, but it wasn’t enough; I had to have the second season. I bought it even though I didn’t have the money, and I watched it all last term, just finishing it recently. Sadly, I haven’t seen the third season at all because I didn’t finish season two until halfway through the current season. But you can bet that as soon as it comes out on DVD, I’m gonna buy that sucker. At the moment, however, I’m going through severe Veronica withdrawals. I re-watched last season’s finale recently just to get a fix of the TV-crack that is “Veronica Mars.”
What’s sad is that I’m not the only one not watching; no one watches “Mars.” It appears on the seldom-watched CW network, which is basically asking for no one to watch. The fact that it follows “Gilmore Girls” on Tuesday nights should give it more viewers, but let’s be honest: No one really watches “Gilmore Girls” anymore. From what I hear, it’s kind of gone downhill in recent years. To make matters worse, networks don’t like to keep shows around if they don’t bring in the viewers, and every season of “Mars” has been a guessing game as to whether or not it will get picked up for the next year. It barely made the cut this year, when the WB and UPN joined forces. As much as I hate to say it, I have a feeling it won’t make it next year. It always makes me sad when quality shows (like “Sons & Daughters,” a short-lived comedy from ABC, “Touching Evil” on USA or Fox’s aptly-named “Arrested Development”) get canceled because they don’t draw audiences like they could.
When it really comes down to it, though, I guess “Veronica Mars” was destined to be a cult hit and nothing more. After all, how many people are really going to find the idea of a teenage detective intriguing or original? Veronica’s in college now, so it isn’t necessarily a teenage detective show anymore, but a college detective investigating a rash of date rapes probably sounds even less appealing.
What am I going to do if the big-wigs at the CW decide that Veronica is no longer worth their programming hours? I might cry a little, but in the end, I’ll always have my DVDs to keep me partially satisfied.
And I’ll always secretly call Veronica Mars my friend.
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