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Veronica Mars is a critically acclaimed American teen drama/mystery-neo-noir series that premiered on UPN on September 22, 2004, airing its first two seasons on the network before moving to The CW Television Network on October 3, 2006. The show stars Kristen Bell as the title character: a student, progressing from high school to college during the series, who moonlights as a private investigator under the wing of her detective father. Said to be "a little bit Buffy and a little bit Bogart",[1] the show balances murder mystery, high school and college drama, and social commentary with sarcasm and offbeat humor. The third season of the show premiered in the United States and Canada on October 3, 2006, at 9 p.m. ET/PT on The CW and Sun TV (ET only) respectively, a time slot that remained unchanged throughout the season. The second mystery arc of the season began on January 23, 2007.
On March 16, 2007, E!'s Kristin Veitch posted an entry on her blog stating that Veronica Mars will not be returning for a fourth season on the CW network, but retracted its certainty hours later.[2][3] On the same day, Whitney Pastorek wrote in the online edition of Entertainment Weekly, "Veronica Mars has had a good run, but the Pussycat Dolls' well-rated reality series probably just ended it."[4] However, in an EW.com edition two days earlier, Veronica Mars headed the list of a feature called "Readers to Networks: Save These Shows!"[5] It was later announced that the producers were producing a trailer (showing a shift of the main character's storyline and setting four years into the future) in an attempt to secure a fourth season.[6] Creator Rob Thomas quickly fired back that while nothing was set in stone, it was an idea to pitch to the network for a fourth season if possible.[7]
Summary
Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.
Background eventsIn the pilot, flashbacks and voiceovers show that teenager Veronica Mars was living the dream life in the Southern California seaside town of Neptune until her best friend, Lilly Kane, was murdered. Keith Mars, Veronica's father and the county's sheriff, accused Lilly's father, software billionaire Jake Kane, of the murder, and was forced out of his job by a recall election. Veronica's mother Lianne, angered over what Keith's actions cost the family, first turned to alcohol for comfort and then left home under mysterious circumstances.
Shortly after Lilly's murder and Keith's scandal, Veronica attended an 09er party. The next morning, she woke up in a guest bedroom without her underwear and with no memory of the previous night's events, presumably having been drugged and then raped. Sheriff Don Lamb, her father's replacement and rival, sarcastically dismissed Veronica when she attempted to report the crime. As the show begins, Veronica has started helping her father in his new private detective agency. She is struggling to balance her life between school and detective work, as well as to make sense of all the unexplained events that have taken place over the past year. Season oneIn the course of other investigations, Veronica comes across two pieces of evidence about the Lilly Kane murder case that shatter the status quo. The first breaks the watertight alibi of almost everyone involved with Lilly, including the entire Kane family; the second suggests that Lilly's confessed killer, Abel Koontz, almost certainly did not commit the crime. Veronica resolves to find the true killer. As Veronica furthers the murder investigation, she also works on unrelated cases each week, which are introduced and resolved in each episode. Other important investigations that span the season include Veronica's search for her wayward mother and for the person who raped her at the 09er party. Veronica is joined in her "non-09er" life by new allies: new Neptune High student Wallace Fennel; Eli “Weevil” Navarro, head of the Latino biker gang the PCHers; and Cindy "Mac" Mackenzie, Neptune High's resident computer genius. Veronica uses their resources, as well as those provided by her father and his contacts, as her reputation for sleuthing grows and more schoolmates ask her for help. These new friends also help Veronica deal with Logan, whom she terms the "obligatory psychotic jackass" of Neptune High. Logan blames Veronica for Lilly’s death and takes pleasure in making her life difficult. When he needs help with traumatic events in his own family, though, he ends up turning to Veronica, and near the end of the season, they unexpectedly fall into a relationship--much to the shock of the other 09ers, especially Duncan. Season twoThe second season begins with the introduction of two ongoing mysteries. First, Logan, in a bout of drunkenness spurred by Veronica's readiness to believe the worst of him, picks a fight with Weevil and the PCHers and ends up accused of killing PCHer Felix Toombs, a charge he vehemently denies. The charges put Logan on the wrong side not only of the law, but also of Weevil and his gang. Together with the losses he suffered earlier that year, the charges also provoke him to revert to his former sophomoric ways, which leads Veronica to break up with him. Partway through the season, Weevil is finally convinced of Logan's innocence, and the two team up to find the real killer, with occasional help from Veronica. The second mystery is introduced in the final minutes of the first episode, when a school bus full of Neptune High students careens off a cliff, killing almost everyone on board. Veronica, who was supposed to be on the bus, makes it her mission to discover why the bus crashed. This season shows Veronica’s life returning to much the way it had been before Lilly’s death. Having broken up with Logan during the summer and reunited with Duncan Kane, she is again accepted, albeit begrudgingly, by the 09ers. However, her private-eye sideline and tough persona keep her from being truly assimilated back into the rich crowd, as is made evident in the ironically titled season opener, "Normal Is the Watchword. 09ers Dick and Cassidy “Beaver” Casablancas become regulars, and the season shows them dealing with a gold-digging stepmother, Kendall Casablancas, with whom they are left with when their father leaves the country on the lam from the SEC. Wallace also discovers that his biological father is alive, and moves to Chicago to live with him briefly before returning halfway through the season. In a slight departure from the format of the first season, these main mysteries are solved at different times: the Felix Toombs murder is solved five episodes before the end of the season (in "Plan B"), and the bus-crash mystery is solved in the final episode ("Not Pictured"). Much emotional tension is resolved as well, with Veronica reuniting with Logan in the final minutes of "Not Pictured". Season threeThe third season begins with Veronica and Logan starting their freshman year at Neptune's Hearst College, along with second-season regulars Wallace, Mac, and Dick. Two new regulars are introduced: Stosh "Piz" Piznarski, Wallace’s roommate, and Parker Lee, Mac’s roommate. Sheriff Don Lamb also becomes a regular. The season was initially designed to have three separate mysteries that would be introduced and resolved discretely instead of concurrently. The first mystery took place over the first nine episodes. Originally, the second mystery was to be seven episodes long and the third mystery was to occur over the last six episodes of the season. This was changed when The CW, the show's new carrier, ordered only a 20-episode season instead of the usual 22 episodes. The second mystery arc was shortened to six episodes,[8] and the third mystery was first changed from a six-episode arc to a five-episode arc and then, after an eight-week hiatus for the show was announced, to stand-alone episodes designed to be friendlier to new viewers.[9][10] The first mystery, introduced in the season two episode "The Rapes of Graff", follows Veronica’s attempts to find out the Hearst College rapist. This mystery is solved in the ninth episode, “Spit & Eggs”. The next mystery, a murder, is introduced in the same episode. So far, the season has chronicled Veronica and Logan’s failing attempts to maintain their relationship in the face of Veronica’s ingrained mistrust of him and of all relationships. Logan compounds the problem first when, out of fear for Veronica's safety, he hires a bodyguard,[11] and then again when he has a sexual tryst with Veronica's high-school nemesis Madison Sinclair during a period when his on-again/off-again relationship with Veronica is off. At the end of the second mystery arc, Logan has begun dating Mac's roommate, Parker. Early on in the season, Keith adds to Veronica's cynicism by beginning an affair with a married client, Harmony Chase. Meanwhile, Wallace struggles to balance academics and sports, and his roommate, Piz, develops a crush on Veronica. Dick has a breakdown and appeals to Logan for help; he lived with Logan until joining a fraternity house on campus. Mac, meanwhile, still has emotional scars from the previous year's incident with Beaver, but she meets a new love interest in "Show Me the Monkey". Near the end of the second mystery arc, Sheriff Don Lamb is killed, and Keith Mars is appointed interim sheriff. CharactersMain charactersCurrentImage:Veronica3.jpg Season three cast
Former
Recurring charactersFamily
Residents of Neptune
Neptune High
Hearst College
Spoilers end here.
Episodes and airingsUnited StatesThe third season of the show currently airs in the United States and Canada at 9/8c on The CW. Because the show now airs as a lead-out following Gilmore Girls, a well-established series with a similar audience, instead of various re-runs of America's Next Top Model and UPN sitcoms as it did during its UPN tenure, it has begun to draw stronger ratings. Fox 44 will also air Veronica Mars on Tuesdays at 11 p.m. ET in the Burlington and Plattsburgh, areas, picking up from where they left last year with WB programming. U.S. Television RatingsSeasonal rankings (based on average total viewers per episode) of Veronica Mars on UPN and The CW. Note: Each U.S. network television season starts in late September and ends in late May, which coincides with the completion of May sweeps.
During the first season, the show aired Tuesdays at 9 p.m. ET and garnered low ratings, coming in consistently last in its time slot behind The WB's One Tree Hill. However, the combination of its strong fan base, regular critical praise for its witty writing and strong female protagonist, and the fact that it fit UPN's desired young female viewer demographic was enough to convince the network to renew the show for a second season. Veronica Mars is the only UPN drama series of the 2004–2005 season to survive into the 2005–2006 season, surviving the cancellation of higher-rated UPN series Kevin Hill and Star Trek: Enterprise. MTV presented an encore run of the series (only the first half of the first season); episodes aired about eight days later, on Wednesdays at 7 p.m. ET. In July and August of 2005, UPN's corporate sibling CBS also aired repeats of the show on Fridays at 8 p.m. ET, in an effort to increase exposure for the series. The show's pilot episode was originally tested at CBS and almost picked up by the television network. The ratings it scored during its summer 2005 run created more audience traction on its home network, which could be seen when the second season began on UPN the following September. For the second season, the show was moved to Wednesdays at 9 p.m. ET. Toward the end of the fifth cycle of Top Model in December 2005, the show garnered relatively high ratings, including one of its highest rated episodes of the season, "One Angry Veronica." However, the show's ratings fell because of the failure of South Beach, which ended up losing viewers and giving Veronica Mars a weak lead-in. Lost on ABC and FOX's American Idol results show were the dominant shows in the timeslot beginning in the same month, and also contributed to ratings woes for the show. As well, several UPN stations regularly carried weekday college and NBA basketball games over the winter, causing Veronica Mars to be pre-empted and moved to a weekend timeslot that was inconvenient for its regular viewers. By early February, the damage done by all of these factors (mostly South Beach, which continued in a ratings free-fall) prompted UPN to take drastic action in order to save Veronica Mars. On February 15, two days before the scheduled new episode "Versatile Toppings" was due to air, the episode was substituted with a rerun, and shortly afterward UPN announced that the show would go on hiatus until the beginning of Top Model's new cycle in mid-March. This development met with mixed reactions, with some afraid the show would lose momentum being pulled through February sweeps, and others thankful because the rest of the second season would air uninterrupted and with a much more solid lead-in. The show resumed new episodes on March 15, but still had some ratings struggles because of the American Idol results show. UPN had tested reruns on Tuesday night at 9 p.m. ET for a few weeks before the show resumed new Wednesday episodes to see if ratings were stable in that slot. The former Mars timeslot had been a disaster for the network since fall, with both Sex, Love & Secrets and Get This Party Started undeniable failures; both shows ended up dead last in the Nielsen season ratings chart for the 2005-2006 season.[15] Knowing that the show might continue to have problems on Wednesday nights, UPN decided to return the show to its former Tuesday timeslot on April 11, 2006 to move away from the Lost/American Idol juggernaut. Ratings dropped in the first week, but stabilized by the end of the season. Overall, in its second season, the show ranked 145th out of 156 in the season ratings chart;[16] however, its vocal fan base, desirable demographic, and critical acclaim outweighed the numbers and led to the show's renewal. Some viewers believe they were given a heads-up during the Season Two finale when one character, answering his phone, asks, "C.W.?" and is answered, "It's a done deal"--although this exchange also fits the plotline rationally in that the caller's name is Clarence Wiedman ("C.W.") and he has just completed an important job for the character he is calling. Airing of the show was consistent on Tuesday nights at 9pm in the network's final summer, although several UPN affiliates dropped the network immediately after May sweeps (like Salt Lake City station KPNZ), pre-empted UPN programming often (as in the case of Green Bay's WACY, which pre-empted the network's second hour where possible), or moved it to a low-viewed slot in the late night hours (like WBQC in Cincinnati). Individual ratings for original episode broadcasts for Season Two can be found on the individual episode pages. On May 16, 2006, it was confirmed that Veronica Mars would be part of the new The CW's Fall 2006–2007 lineup once The WB and UPN ceased operations in fall 2006. The show was initially given a 13-episode order, with the option for more if it did well in the Nielsen ratings. On November 16, 2006, a full season order was confirmed for the third season, although the number of episodes was scaled back to 20 instead of the traditional 22. Although TV Guide suspects this is a sign that a fourth season is unlikely, the episode order of 20 more likely stemmed from the fact that The CW does not have enough money to produce 22.[citation needed] In December 2006, Veronica Mars Season Three was added to the iTunes Store and immediately landed in the top 10 of Season Pass subscriptions, ahead of such notable series as Lost season 3 and Scrubs season 6. On January 19, 2007, CW Entertainment President Dawn Ostroff announced that, while she was pleased with the gradual improvement of Veronica Mars' ratings, the show would be put on hiatus after February sweeps to air a new reality series, The Search for the Next Pussycat Doll, in order to launch that show, and prevent the out-of-sweeps rerun erosion common to serialized dramas. The hiatus began March 6 and will end May 1, at which time Veronica Mars will return for five episodes which will have non-serialized plotlines. Ostroff did not confirm either that the show will be renewed for a fourth season or that it will not. InternationalSince Canada's CTV began airing the series in June 2005 and Britain's LivingTV in October 2005, the show has expanded internationally to almost thirty other countries who have joined them.
DVD releasesRegion 1 (USA/Canada)
Region 4 (Australia)Warner Bros. Australia have plans to release the show on DVD, but have encountered some legal problems caused by music licensing. Season 1 was originally slated for a 2006 release, but was postponed soon after. It is still unclear, at this stage, whether or not these legal issues will be resolved anytime soon. Reception
TV Critics Top Ten Lists2005[28]
2006[29]
Awards2005-2006 IV Awards
American Film Institute Awards
Family Television Awards
International Cinematographers Guild Publicists Awards
Satellite Awards
Saturn Awards
Teen Choice Awards
Television Critics Association Awards
Writers Guild of America Awards
Fan campaignsVeronica Mars has attracted a loyal and devoted fanbase that includes internet communities of Veronica Mars fans. Many of them have taken part in minor and major campaigns to bring more viewers and publicity to Veronica Mars in an effort to ensure the show's success. Among the fanbase are a considerable number of influential television and movie writers, drawn by the show's noir edge and quip-filled writing. These include, notably, Joss Whedon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly), who has called Veronica Mars "the best show ever" and who made a guest appearance on the Season Two episode "Rat Saw God"; and Kevin Smith (Clerks, Dogma), who guest-starred in the Season Two episode "Driver Ed". Both men have directed their own adherents toward the show, with Whedon sending out calls to Firefly and Buffy fans on their various websites to save Veronica Mars when it was put on hiatus. A group of devoted fans on LiveJournal who call themselves Cloud Watchers have been dedicated to this effort since the spring of 2006 in light of the approaching merger of UPN and The WB into The CW. On May 9, 2006, the group hired a plane to fly between the UPN offices in Los Angeles and the future site of The CW headquarters in Burbank, pulling a banner that read "RENEW VERONICA MARS! CW 2006!" to get the attention of network executives, the press, and anyone else in the Los Angeles area. They had previously sent future CW executives, those in charge at the new network's parent companies, and influential people in the entertainment media care packages including binoculars, information regarding the plane's flight plan, and Veronica Mars-inspired gifts.[30] Veronica Mars was officially renewed for a third season on May 18, 2006, to air on The CW Tuesdays at 9pm ET starting on October 3, 2006,[31] but the fans did not stop campaigning for the show. The Cloud Watchers started a new campaign, this one to bring a larger viewership to Veronica Mars by donating DVD sets of Season One to libraries across the United States, with a goal of reaching the top 100 Nielsen markets and each of the 50 states. They reached both these goals as of August 14, 2006, and reached their new goal of 500 donated sets on September 5, 2006.[32] With the show's third season order cut from 22 episodes to 20 -- a move that was met with much alarm and dismay[citation needed] -- many of the show's diehard fans swung into action once more. Fans at the Television Without Pity website began organizing a flyer campaign to raise awareness of the show, and increase viewership in time for the show's return to The CW on May 1, 2007. In early March 2007, Save Veronica Mars[33] -- a fan-run website that was instrumental in spreading the word when fans campaigned successfully for a second season -- returned with a new, two-pronged purpose: get the show renewed a fourth season, and make sure that the show stays in production long enough to have a sufficient number of episodes for syndication. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
