It is a sad, sad day in the Riess-Smith household. Tonight we will watch the series finale of Veronica Mars, which the CW not-quite-a-network officially cancelled last week. I'm pretty crushed. Even though this third season has been a serious disappointment, I blame that on network interference and not on series creator Rob Thomas, who apparently was forced to adopt a drippy mystery-of-the-week format to try to win fans who either never understood, or had lost patience with, the show's much more compelling season-long story approach. The new strategy tanked. Apparently there's also no hope for the rumored Veronica-as-a-future-FBI-agent spinoff, either. Kristen Bell (left) has already taken another job on a CW pilot for next season. Why she would choose to remain with that network may be VM's biggest mystery of all. Well, Veronica herself predicted disappointments in the first line of the first episode of the show: "Sooner or later, the people you love let you down."
All is not lost. Although there's little hope for VM on TV, we do have a consolation prize: an interesting and funny book of essays called Neptune Noir: Unauthorized Investigations into Veronica Mars. I'm reading it now. Thomas himself edited the volume, opening it with a behind-the-scenes look at how VM came into existence and offering a quirky little graf or two to introduce every essay. And most of the pieces are darn good. They're more personal than the usual anthology fodder, with writers describing their love affair with the show as well as dissecting every conceivable theme, most every episode, and every character's dirty little secrets. I am truly enjoying the book. But of course it begs the question of all the great cultural work that the show will never get to explore now, so reading it is bittersweet.
Farewell, Veronica Mars. "We used to be friends, a long time ago, we used to be friends . . . ." I am going to miss you terribly. Now can I have a pony?
Sadness. To think that Veronica couldn't defeat the evil cabal of the Pussycat Dolls breaks my heart. Do you think Buffy could have?
I'm with you, Jana, Veronica Mars has not lived up to the golden legacy of its first season, and it lost much of the noir shadings in S3. (Rudy if you're reading, I concede, you were right about S3). But still -- one of the best things on TV.
"If I ever die, do me a favor. Go on Oprah and tell the world that I loved kittens."
Posted by: Kelly | May 22, 2007 at 06:31 PM