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.
March 17, 2007 10:26 PM
Abigail Nussbaum said…
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.
March 17, 2007 10:54 PM
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.
March 20, 2007 7:42 AM

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The 2023 Hugo Awards: Somehow, It Got Worse

The last month has been a busy one in Hugo and Worldcon fandom. After the shock of the much-belated 2023 nominating stats, and their revelation of serious irregularities in the compilation of the award's ballot, there was a great ferment of conversation and action. Mainstream publications have caught wind of the scandal and publicized it far and wide . Turnover in the few permanent committees that oversee the Hugo trademark and intellectual property has been high . The poor folks at the upcoming Glasgow Worldcon have been scrambling to respond to the evolving situation and to distance themselves from the previous committee—including, most recently, making a laconic announcement that they would refuse any of Chengdu's passalong funds, the budgetary surplus that is traditionally bequeathed from one Worldcon to the next. And stats nerds—of which this community is, unsurprisingly, blessed with a surfeit—have been furiously crunching the nominations numbers and EPH calculations...
Read more

The 2023 Hugo Awards: Now With an Asterisk

It's been a while since we've had one of these dramas. On Saturday, the nominating stats for the 2023 Hugo awards, which were announced in Chengdu, China in October 2023, were released to the public . There was a great deal of anticipation for these numbers, in no small part because of their much-delayed release. Though the WSFS constitution permits Hugo administrators to wait as long as 90 days before releasing the voting and nominating stats, most Hugo teams have them ready to go within minutes of the ceremony's conclusion. Chengdu, in contrast, waited the full allotted period, and even went a little bit over (the voting stats were released separately in December). Once the stats were released, it quickly became clear why the Chengdu Hugo team were hesitant to make them public. There are any number of irregularities and questionable choices in this document that suggest everything from erratic voter behavior, to incompetent collation and calculation of the nomination rank...
Read more

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

The first thing that must be said about this movie is that it should not work. It's a prequel to one of the most mind-blowing, groundbreaking, and just plain revolutionary action movies of the 21st century—and prequels are a bad idea in most cases, but all the more so when the character they revolve around has already given you their entire backstory in their original introduction, which is also the final, culminating act of their character arc. (To put it another way, if you had asked me, nine years ago, which character I thought offered more fertile ground for prequel storytelling, Imperator Furiosa or Han Solo, I would have picked Han without a moment's hesitation, and I don't even like Han that much.) And it's a follow-up to a movie whose chief virtue lies in its conciseness—in being a single, drawn-out, pulse-pounding, increasingly deranged car chase. Which means you can either try to repeat that accomplishment, which will inevitably feel a bit old hat; or you can ...
Read more