Once Again, Good News, Bad News

E!Online's Kristin Veitch reports:
According to CW insiders, the network has not officially canceled Veronica Mars. However, here's the catch: It is currently considering a different format for the fourth season. From what I hear, that format would leap four years into the future and focus on Veronica as an FBI agent. Aside from returning star Kristen Bell (duh), the rest of the cast is yet to be determined, but it isn't likely that many of her current costars would be on hand.
Even before the show's first season was over, I was hoping that the second season wouldn't follow the standard format of high school-set series and rejoin its characters after the summer. It seemed obvious to me that if the writers hoped to repeat the first season's accomplishment and tell another compelling season-long mystery, they would have to give Veronica the chance to accumulate more backstory. Half the fun of the first season, after all, was discovering Veronica's past as we got to know her, learning new things about the person she used to be and the events that made her the person she had become. A few years' gap between seasons would allow Veronica to accumulate both backstory and a new obsession to follow.

On the other hand, there's no shortage of FBI-focused series, and coupled with Rob Thomas's recent assertion that he'd like to take the show to a completely episodic format, I can't help but wonder whether this change might not bleed Veronica Mars of everything that made it original. I guess we'll have to wait and see.

Never a dull moment with this show, huh?

Comments

Anonymous said…
I'm a bit confused by Rob Thomas. He's obviously brilliant, yet he doesn't seem to recognize where he is most brilliant. In his TWOP interview he seemed very put out with people who loved the first season and felt the second was inferior, even going so far as to assert that the second season was BETTER in some ways. Given the almost-perfection of the first season, I can't help wondering if he even knows how great some of his work actually is.

Veronica as FBI-agent sounds interesting, but it lacks the emotional appeal of the beleagured teenager. I think being an FBI agent would put Veronica in a position of too much power--and corporate rigor--to be truly engaging.
I do agree that Rob Thomas's outlook can be a little perplexing at times. He seems obsessed, for instance, with the first season serial killer episode, which while admittedly not a great hour of television is certainly not the worst episode the show has ever aired, and not something that should be plaguing Thomas in light of some of the show's more serious problems over the last two seasons.

But then, by the very nature of their roles the artist and the audience are going to have different perspectives on the work, so it's not entirely surprising that this dissonance exists.

I think being an FBI agent would put Veronica in a position of too much power--and corporate rigor--to be truly engaging.

That's been worrying me as well. It's why I mentioned the profusion of FBI-based shows - to put Veronica in a position of unmitigated power would be to essentially strip the show of much of what makes it original.
Anonymous said…
I'm less worried about Veronica becoming an FBI agent, than the possibility the secondary cast has been/will be completely dumped; losing history and the personal relationships that humanize Veronica.

to put Veronica in a position of unmitigated power would be to essentially strip the show of much of what makes it original.

But would she really have unmitigated power? As a new agent, she'd be at the very bottom of the bureacratic totem pole, while she'd have power over the public she would have to try to work around the bureacracy and politics of the agency to get her idea of justice.

My biggest problem with the FBI, it's the law enforcement branch Veronica would least likely fit in.

Then again the odds of a 4th season are so slim, I'm not going to sweat a format change.

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