Rob Thomas’ last ditch effort to save his show amounted to nothing. It was probably for the best.
Veronica Mars was always a show stuck in dire straits. Though greeted with rave reviews and bolstered by the nurturing love of creator Rob Thomas (the author of Rats Saw God, not the Matchbox 20 front man), the show never was able to garner much of an audience, pulling in an average of 2.3 million viewers per episode, a number low even by UPN (and in its third season, CW) numbers.
But it’s not for a lack of trying. The premise, which focused on a teenage girl navigating the hall of high school, while also working as a de facto private detective in her spare time, was right up the demographic alley. In the first two seasons, Thomas and Co. bravely and deftly walked the line between case-of-the-week stories and the season long arcs, in which a more complex mystery was slowly rolled out. This (theoretically) would give the casual audience leeway to pop in and out of the show as they pleased, yet maintain a solid enough arc to keep people tuning in every week. Or at least that was the plan. Whether viewers were turned off by the premise or the neo-noir tone, or they found the season-long arc impenetrable, the end results was that a show that looked on paper as if it should have been a hit ended up flopping.
Thinking that the main obstacle might be the season long arc, Thomas, at the behest of the CW, decided to finagle the format a little bit for the third season, by breaking the season up into three distinct arcs, thus providing even extra entry points for new/casual viewers. The move backfired. By this time, Veronica Mars’ reputation was set, and new viewers couldn’t be enticed to try out the show. The longtime fans, meanwhile, were vocally upset with the change, and the show lost some of its critical support. Meanwhile, the show’s order gotten shortened by 2 episodes, and the second story arc got downgraded from seven episodes to six, and the third arc went from six to five. Once VM was placed on hiatus, those last five episodes were switched from a mystery arc to five standalone cases (though it did keep up continuing romantic/social lines), in one last bid to rope in some casual viewers. This move also failed to produce any results.
During this particularly troublesome time, Thomas, who seemed unable to let his pet project die, came up with one last-ditch effort to save his show, by offering to completely reinvent the show for a hypothetical fourth season. This reboot of sorts would jump the show’s timeline by a few years, as we drop in on Veronica as a fresh-off-the-farm FBI agent at the Bureau’s Los Angeles office, seemingly out of contact with everyone she ever knew from Neptune.
The end results were disappointing, and they looked like this:
If forced to put a finger on what exactly was wrong with this pitch, it’s that it comes off no different as any other network procedural you’ve seen, even if most procedurals don’t take place at the FBI (or at least they didn’t back in 2006). Certainly Kirsten Bell’s Veronica is still intact, making quips and 80s references with ease, as is her spunky voice-over, but the rest of what made Veronica Mars such a unique show is gone. Not only are none of the supporting players from the first three seasons around, but also gone are the themes of class discrimination and alienation that gave the original version of the show its relevance. Now obviously the latter has no place in the FBI setting, and the former is briefly addressed in regards to departmental nepotism, but it doesn’t feel like these were going to be driving forces for the new show. That leaves the show – and Veronica – with a cheesy competition with a female peer and a soapy quasi-romantic relationship with another co-worker, things that just feel staid.
There are two ways to look at this approach:
1) That Rob Thomas at this point had become so jaded and beaten down by his experience with the show that he just decided to throw caution – and the show – to the wind in one last desperate bid to save his beloved character
OR
2) In order to trick the CW into picking up his show for a fourth season, Thomas presented them with a version of the show in most audience friendly (read: blasé and trite) procedural format possible, all the while having untold plans of how he would work the show’s original themes and characters into this new format.
If it’s the first, then this pilot (and seeing as how the show being pitched here so radically different from the show up until that point, one might as well see it as a pilot for a whole new show, just one that carries over an established character, it deserves to be called a “pilot”) serves as yet another example of the soul- and creativity-crushing machine that is network television, and/or proof that Rob Thomas is a sell-out. (Take your pick.) If it’s the second – and I highly suspect that it is – then this pitch is just frustrating in its half-assed nature, and an example of how network involvement can ruin great shows.
But let’s assume that Thomas is smart, that he knows the show can’t possibly work without at least a recurring appearance from Keith Mars, and that fans would truly revolt if favorite son Logan suddenly went away without explanation. (And since this is all hypothetical, whoever your favorite non-Veronica character was, let’s assume they return as well.) That still leaves the show lacking in the thematic department; while the first three seasons were able to center the cases both large and small around Veronica’s high school and college (i.e. her immediate world), thus allowing her cases to have an emotional and/of thematic impact, placing her in the world of the FBI robs the show of that connection. Certainly the show can try to deal with some themes with these cases – and could even try to do another season-long or just multi-episode arc – but it would be hard-pressed to find cases that could consistently and conceivably relate back to Veronica in a meaningful way. Competition with coworkers? An inter-office romance? Those are things that we’ve seen dozens of times before, and here they lack anything that makes them feel unique to the world of Veronica Mars.
What we have then, is yet another case of a pilot’s style over substance, where the pilot in question places more emphasis on how it looks than what it presents. Some of this pilot’s problems – the lack of known characters, the barely-there plot – are simply the results of doing a pitchpilot, especially one that was most likely thrown together during or right after production on the show’s third season, when it would have been impossible to write a full script and gather the regulars all together in one place. But what can’t be forgiven is the lack of theme and narrative direction, especially considering how good the show’s original pilot was at delivering on both these fronts. Back when it the show started, Thomas knew what he wanted the show to be; with his back up against the wall, he seems to have lost his creative vision.
And though it’s obvious why fans of the show/people with good taste might see this pitch and decide that this show would no longer be worth their time, the real question is why the CW decided to pass. With this pitch, the show became firmly settled in the procedural camp, something that networks just love because those types of unchallenging shows bring in the viewers and, by extension, the money. Maybe the network had learned its lesson from season three, and was thoroughly convinced that Veronica Mars was going to remain impenetrable to the uninitiated. Or maybe they saw what I saw, that the cost of undergoing this transformation was that the show lost all its heart and soul, and become just another faceless procedural, albeit one with a charismatic lead. In either case, the network made the right choice, and the pilot remains unseen by the general public, left to the hardcore fans and the brave to uncover.
A friend of mine once said that the show’s second season finale was “the end of Veronica Mars”, meaning that in season three the show stopped being the thing he loved and was instead something that he merely liked. I have to disagree with that statement; season three was still close enough to Thomas’ original vision of the show that I can watch it without too many qualms. It’s the season four pilot that I balk at, and that show just how much more the show could have fallen. So buck up Veronica Mars fans, and rejoice in the fact that season three was merely good, as opposed to great.
Next Week: The first attempt to get The Big Bang Theory to air.
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