You guys, I’m finally doing it. The kickstarter funded Veronica Mars movie was the extra little push I needed to finally, ten years later, take up with that girl-detective everyone loves so much. I’m about a week behind the Vulture training schedule (and yes, this is 2014 and yes, I am a millennial content-addict, so yes, there is a training schedule to watch a now-defunct show in anticipation for its crowd-sourced feature debut). I just finished season 1 and I’m crashing hard towards the finish line, loving every minute of it.
What follows may contain some spoilers, but it ended ten years ago and I will not apologize if you are similarly behind the times as I am.
sdf
What is Veronica Mars? It was created by author Rob Thomas, who wrote a fomative and entirely forgettable book about a struggling teen called Rats Saw God. I don’t remember anything about it except that for a brief period of time, it was very important to me.
sdf
VM stars everyone’s favorite sloth-lover, Kristen Bell, as a 17-year-old high schooler who moonlights as a private investigator. In the first forty minute segment, we learn that Veronica’s best friend was murdered, her sheriff father ID’d the wrong guy and lost his job, her mother took off, and her boyfriend dumped her with nary a word. Oh, also, at a party she was roofied and raped but she doesn’t know by whom. It’s a lot, and the ongoing mysteries of the murder, the disappearance, the date rape, and the dumping unravel over the next 22 episodes.
sdf
I just saw a picture of two rivers outside of Manaus, Brazil, that collide without intermingling for three miles. Coffee colored water runs up against milky tea and never the twain shaill mix; It is as freaky and beautiful as anything I’ve seen in a while, and that’s kind of how I feel about Veronica Mars.sdf
On one side of the divide is dark, heavy shit, where the stakes are high as hell. A manipulative teacher seduces a student and she ends up pregnant and ostracized. The class asshole’s father, a movie star, beats him with a belt behind closed doors. A slew of co-eds from the local university turn up dead, strangled by a guitar cord.
sdf
On the other side, a perky blonde teen finds lost dogs for classmates, investigates falsified drug tests for athletes, and rescues the nerds from the bullies with nothing but her wits and a giant camera. All the while, she navigates the normal pitfalls of adolescence, awkward ex-boyfriends, catty girls in bathrooms, the ever-churning rumor mill, and the tension between the haves and the have-nots. It’s in that fluctuating line where dark and light crash into each other that Veronica Mars comes out smarter, funnier, and edgier than everybody else.
sdf
It’s a little bit Rori-Gilmore-at-Chilton meets baby-Sydney-Bristow meets Harriet-the-spy with the guest star roster of your dreams. Adam Scott, Leighton Meester, Max Greenfield, Krysten Ritter, Aaron Paul.
sdf
I’ve got 17 days to watch about 30 more episodes, think I can do it?
sdf
Related Post: Sasheer Zamata and “preferential casting”
sdf
Related Post: Why we need more sex on TV
