Veronica Mars was a noir show often misrepresented as a cliched teen drama. Sadly, I'm not sure how else it could have been marketed, since a noir show featuring a petite blonde teenageer as a lead is a pretty hard sell. I must admit that when I first heard of the show, I thought that the concept sounded pretty lame. But then the reviews started coming in...Neptune, California is a city cursed without a middle class. It is home to some of the richest people in America, including a Bill Gates-esque software designer, a high-priced actor, and a real estate magnate. The children of these multi-millionaires are known as '09ers at high school because they live in the 90909 zip code area of the town. The rest of Neptune is home to lower-class laborers who work for 09er families. As Veronica points out in the pilot episode, in Neptune, your parents are either millionaires or work for millionaires. But without a middle class to buffer the relations between rich and poor, things sometimes get heated between the two groups.
And why shouldn't they? There is corruption on both sides of the socio-economic fence, and each side blames the other for their problems. The 09ers exploit everyone else and get away with murder (both literally and figuratively) due to the attitudes of local law enforcement. But this doesn't mean that the less fortunate are innocent victims. Some join gangs, others steal from their employers, but you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone in Neptune who is innocent.
That's where Veronica Mars comes in. Although the Mars family was never among the 09ers, she lived the life at one time in her life. Her father, Keith, was the sheriff of Balboa County, which Neptune was a part of, earning the family some prestige. But even more important were the members of Veronica's inner social circle. She used to date a boy named Duncan Kane, the son of the richest man in town, and her best friend was Duncan's sister, Lily. Jake Kane, Duncan and Lily's father, is a software designer who pioneered streaming video. The incredible rise in value of Kane Software stock made everyone who worked for the company richer than their wildest dreams, making Jake Kane one of the most beloved men in Neptune.Everything changed for Veronica at the end of her sophomore year of high school. Lily was brutally murdered one afternoon, and Keith's prime suspect was Jake Kane, Lily's father. This didn't sit well with the residents of Neptune, and an emergency recall election got Keith pulled from office. His replacement, Don Lamb, was barely competent and a complete asshole to non-09ers. When Veronica stood behind her father, her so-called 09er friends turned on her. Led by Logan Echolls, Lily's on-again/off-again boyfriend and angry son of a self-centered actor, rumors about Veronica were spread by the 09ers. In an effort to prove that the harsh rumors didn't get to her, Veronica crashed an 09er party, where she was raped. These experiences left her jaded at best.
Mind you, all of those events happened before the events of the pilot and were relayed to us in flashbacks. Our first glimpses of Veronica were of an angry young girl who worked at her father's private investigation firm. As we watch her befriend both a new kid named Wallace who was duct taped to the school's flag pole as well as the biker who put him there, we begin to see troubled person she is underneath her tough exterior. The flashbacks of her hellish sophomore year coincide with the struggles of helping out both Wallace and Weevil (the biker), which end with her visit to the sheriff's office the morning after the rape. Let's just say that Lamb was less than professional.
Soon, it becomes apparent that the man that was arrested for Lily's murder is not the one who killed her. The first season follows Veronica and Keith's search for Lily's true killer, but along the way other multi-episode mysteries are introduced and investigated, including what happened to Veronica's mother after Keith was removed from office and who raped Veronica. Of course, each episode also had a self-contained mystery.Both the overarching and self-contained mysteries shed light on various characters in the town of Neptune. One of the best parts of the show is the sheer depth of the cast of characters. Even tertiary characters get fleshed out stories and can sometimes become regular cast members (watch how Dick Casablancas starts out as a random kid in the second episode, and is listed as a regular in Season 2). But as I said, in Neptune, no one is innocent. Even characters like Keith and Veronica have their secrets, and the events of the show force people and their loved ones to deal with things that were supposed to stay buried. Greed and corruption are important motivators for people in Neptune, but since this is noir, often, some of the worst things done on the show are done due to the good intentions of the people doing the action (such as the feminists in the third season, Logan "decision" the night of Veronica's rape, and Duncan and Veronica's second season kidnapping).
Furthermore, the show likes to take stereotypes and turn them on their heads. People and groups who have negative stereotypes associated with them are often used as red herrings and initially cast in a negative light. But in Veronica Mars, nothing and no one are what/who it/they initially seem. In Neptune, cults may not be evil, fraternity boys may not be moral-less degenerates, and animal rights activists aren't all crazy.
Veronica Mars is more than just a mystery show. It is an examination into the motivations and mindsets of its inhabitants. And they were extremely diverse and entertaining. People were almost always much more than they originally seemed, and this led to some phenomenal storytelling twists.
Sadly, due both to the poor marketing and the serialized nature of the show, it was never able to build an audience. The networks it aired on (it started on UPN, but between its second and third seasons, The WB and UPN merged to form The CW) had a lot of faith in the show, and kept it on the air for three years, hoping that it would finally earn the viewership it deserved. Along the way, there were some network-mandated changes (mostly in Season 2, but the lack of overarching mystery at the end of Season 3 was the final attempt to earn viewers), but the show never lost its voice.
Interestingly enough, Arrested Development followed a very similar journey, which is the first similarity between the shows...
Up next: The Bluths and the Mars
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