Tragedy blows through your life like a tornado, uprooting everything. Creating chaos. You wait for the dust to settle and then you choose. You can live in the wreckage and pretend it’s still the mansion you remember or you can crawl from the rubble and slowly rebuild. Veronica Mars
It’s hard to even look at last Sunday’s headline in the NYT, 2 Days, 2 Cities, 2 Shootings, at least 29 Dead. I don’t want to read the article, I don’t want to know the guys’ names – and I’m sure the killers were both guys even without reading their names, most likely white guys – or read about their shitty childhoods. I don’t want to know about their Facebook pages or manifestos echoing the President of The United State’s incitements. One thing I do know is that violence and hatred are contagious and the news media is helping spread the violence. But I don’t want to talk about that here, now.
In an effort to not listen to the news in the car – which will probably just rile me up – I have taken to listening to podcasts. Several days ago, I was listening to a Nerdette podcast on summer TV with New York Times TV critic Margaret Lyons and her first recommendation was Veronica Mars. I’d heard of Veronica Mars but have never wanted to watch it, I sort of grew tired of Buffy – feeling very guilty – toward the end and imagined that Veronica Mars would be similar. That the critics kept saying that it was the best teenage angst TV since Buffy did not convince me to give it a try. Boy, was I wrong.
By the time I saw Veronica Mars highlighted in an article in the NYT about the best TV since The Sopranos, Michele and I were already halfway through season one on reruns, and loving it. Yes, Veronica Mars is a blond highschool student, living in a Southern California town but that is it for the similarities with Buffy Summers. When the first season starts – it was first broadcast in 2004 – Veronica is living with her father in the beach town of Neptune which is made up of very rich people and the much poorer people who work for them. Where Buffy was about vampires as allegory, V. Mars is about class and highschool turmoil. Veronica’s father, who she lives with, was the town sheriff which carried enough prestige that Veronica hung out with the rich kids but, before the first episode, he is fired for mishandling the murder investigation of Veronica’s best friend, the daughter of the richest, most popular, family in town. Dad is now working as a Private Eye, Veronica’s mother has left, and Veronica has taken a social and class fall. She has also inherited the gumshoe gene from her father.
Veronica is played by Kristen Bell who I know from A Good Place and Veronica Mars is every bit as good, if not better. Bell is both vulnerable and Sam Spade cynical and which, it turns out, is a very appealing combination. In Veronica Mars, we follow much of the action from Veronica’s point of view, through voice-overs, which seems to add realism. Give it a try, the pilot is great and you’ll probably get sucked into the series.