Veronica Mars (2014)

This summer a new brace of Veronica Mars episodes are coming to Hulu. I’m not sure how to precisely describe it. Is it a revival? A reboot? Does it count officially as a show that’s been out of production for many years picking up where it left off like Futurama or Twin Peaks or Will and Grace did, or will it count as a new first season with the same actors playing the same characters for arcane legal reasons? The TV landscape has shifted so dramatically in the last ten years. Not every revival is a good idea. People seemed to have turned in a major way on Arrested Development, and Murphy Brown came and went without making a ripple. If not always creatively successful, what’s obvious in the current environment is that the money exists, if the creatives out there can get the papers signed, to give almost any faintly popular existing intellectual property a shot somewhere. FX’s new series based on the no-budget movie What We Do In The Shadows is one of the best new shows on TV right now, and it looks and sounds substantially better than its fairly recent source material.

Veronica Mars is a show that had to significantly compromise itself just to stay on the air during its original run. In the second and third seasons, the writers had to juggle cast members and truncate storylines just to keep the lights on. In the third season, corporate demanded that they throw out the structure that was the whole basis for the show and wrap up mysteries more quickly. It didn’t go great! What made the first season of Rob Thomas’s teen detective series incongruously great was the way it tracked a slow-burning hard-boiled murder investigation with many suspects, red herrings, betrayals, and role reversals. The second season didn’t manage a similar idea as well, but at least it stuck to the plan. In its last year the show had to navigate the always fraught high school-to-college transition, and it had to handle three shorter arcs, and it had to manage regular cast members popping in and popping out as the network cut costs on their salaries. Thomas and his crew must have felt really attached to the show to even have bothered. But it’s possible that one element in the show’s failure to really pick up much of a second life through word of mouth and streaming is its clear decline in its second and third seasons.

Goodwill for that first season, at least among the small audience that caught on to it at the time, seems to burn eternal. That’s why Veronica Mars, the movie, exists. That’s also why Veronica Mars, the movie, was a pleasant news story for a few months and sank without a trace upon release. Uniquely, the film got made and got a relatively wide release entirely on the basis of a Kickstarter campaign. That’s the nice story. The downside is that Thomas and Kristen Bell made a film that has nothing going for it beyond the pitch. They got practically everyone who appeared in more than one or two episodes of the TV series to come back. It’s nice to see them, and a whole lot of them definitely needed the work, but it gives utterly no argument as to why sitting still for two hours of this is superior to revisiting any given two consecutive episodes from the first season.

The film suffers from the beginning with that long-gestating sequel effect where the characters and conflicts don’t seem to have progressed at all logically as the passage of time would suggest. It begins with Veronica interviewing for jobs in New York at the end of law school, and it quickly establishes that essentially everyone from the show’s world has been standing in place doing nothing of interest for nine years. When Veronica’s ex Logan, whose specialty is being the prime suspect in murders he obviously did not commit, becomes the prime suspect in a murder he obviously did not commit, she puts her life in New York on hold and returns to Neptune to make a bunch of risky decisions to prove his innocence. Along the way she risks her future and walks all over her private investigator father, high school friends, boyfriend, and local law enforcement in the service of making the case, because that’s what Veronica Mars does.

The movie has a very strange attitude towards Veronica’s behavior. It really doesn’t seem to accept that she’s now 30 and breaking into people’s houses in broad daylight is a fundamentally foolish thing for an adult to do. Characters she encounters in the movie continue to treat her like she’s a minor child, including her father, which makes no sense. Kristen Bell is an adult woman. She looks notably physically different than she did when she first played Veronica, as Ryan Hansen’s Dick points out crudely in the film. It would be tacky to criticize Bell for just having had a child, but her curvier figure makes it even harder to square the film’s stubborn insistence that Veronica is absolutely the same person and that’s entirely a good thing. Thomas knows that it’s unhealthy for Veronica to still be so hostile and single-minded in her pursuit of justice, but he has her really lean into it in copious voice-over narration. This might be the first mainstream movie I’ve ever seen that borrows the rhetoric of Alcoholics Anonymous as an argument in favor of continuing harmful addictive behavior. Sure, it’s solving mysteries and not smoking crack that Veronica struggles with, but it’s still a weird look.

Veronica Mars nearly dispenses with plot or any kind of suspense over its central mystery in favor of arranging a series of scenes where basically everybody from the show you might view affectionately pops up and waves to the camera. Credit to Thomas and Bell that the handful of original series actors who have good careers wanted to come back. Max Greenfield and Ken Marino just cameo, but Krysten Ritter is legitimately a character in the movie. Hansen comes through and murders a handful of scenes. Chris Lowell is present, even though literally zero Veronica Mars fans wanted to hear from Piz ever again. Only a couple of actors really get so much as an arc. Enrico Colantoni’s chemistry with Bell as Keith Mars was always the heart and soul of the show, and he brings needed warmth to every scene he’s in. There’s a bit of a subplot about local police corruption that gives Keith more to do than disapprove of Veronica’s life decisions, but it gets less airspace than does a James Franco cameo.

There’s no way Thomas could deliver the story most fans expect without putting Logan Echolls front and center, but Dohring really drops the ball here. He was lovably complex and sarcastic on the show, but in the movie he’s passive and sleepy. Viewers coming to the movie with no memory of Veronica and Logan’s stormy past won’t have the slightest idea why she’s risking it all for him. We don’t even get to hear one of his trademark motivational voicemail messages. Martin Starr barely has time to register as the prime suspect. Gaby Hoffman can’t overcome the fact that her weird stalker character is written as a plot complication and not a person. Also Jerry O’Connell is… in this movie. So are Alejandro Escovedo, Jamie Lee Curtis, Ira Glass, and Eden Sher, for what it’s worth.

It was already a huge weakness in the later seasons of the TV show that likable characters like Weevil, Mac, and Wallace were just sort of there waiting for the writers to give them anything to do, and the movie doesn’t correct that at all. If there’s anything at all to hope for in the revival, it’s that Percy Daggs III’s Wallace finally calls out Veronica for her relentlessly selfish behavior. You might remember really loving Marino’s Vinnie Van Lowe, Daran Norris’s Cliff McCormack, and Greenfield’s Leo D’Amato from the show, but the movie won’t you remind you why. Thomas also makes a miscalculation by directing the material himself. The TV series had a highly distinctive, corroded Miami Vice color palette, somehow making sickly neon green, orange, and purple ominous. The movie, ironically, just looks like a TV show. The costumes are bland by comparison. It seems based on the performances that it could richly have used some additional rehearsal and shooting time. The series usually did a heroic job of not seeming cheap. The movie cynically figures that fans will be so happy to see Veronica return that it won’t matter that it does. The writing, too, leans too heavily into in-jokes, callbacks, and meta references to Veronica Mars production lore which put further distance between potential new viewers and the characters.

I entirely gave Veronica Mars a pass when it initially came out. So evidently did many who were fans of the show. It seems to have had an effect comparable to the Firefly movie Serenity. It came and it went, it was representative of how passionate some fans were about the original subject material, and it didn’t change anything, positively or negatively. Neither seemed to even slightly draw more viewers in. Both, I feel, put all but the most rabid fans in the uncomfortable position of resenting that something they wanted so very much to happen ended up so unrewarding. Fan expectations are a tricky thing to manage. (The Star Wars franchise has an infinite amount of money and talent chipping away at the problem and it just gets worse with every movie. I could bring up Star Trek too but it makes me mad just to think about it.) On a much smaller scale, Veronica Mars is subject to the same conundrum. It’s so sincere in its appreciation for the support of fans that it handicaps itself catering to their every whim, forgetting what drew people to the show initially was that it subverted expectations. It deliberately tried not to do the obvious thing. Cult shows earn their status by being idiosyncratic and unpredictable and personal, and this movie is so very much none of those things, unless you count the inexplicable cameo roster.

But now there’s a new series, and that changes the context. Veronica Mars is a crappy movie whether you liked the show or didn’t. But as a backdoor pilot for a revival, it gets the job done. It’s contrived as hell that by the end of it, Veronica, Logan, her father, and her friends have restored the precise same dynamic they had at the end of Season Two of the show. But now that heavy lifting is done, and the new series can go wherever it wants. It’s not going to have a Kickstarter budget or a fifth-network budget. I sincerely hope it will get to use all of the regular characters in every episode. I’m pretty sure they’ll take the time to get the color timing right so it matches the style of the old seasons. If it comes back and it’s good, it changes the way you have to evaluate the movie. It could go from being pointless and counterproductive to a necessary and valuable step. We shall see.