Guilty Pleasure: "Veronica Mars" (2004 - 2007)

Guilty pleasures, we all have them...time to air some grievances:

I'll admit it. I spent the entire summer of 2006 catching up on every episode of the CW / UPN, teen noir / detective / awesome drama "Veronica Mars." As far as dramatic teen television goes, I'm not ashamed to contend that this gem was a head above the rest of the crop.

While others fixated on "The O.C." or "Friday Night Lights," for their secret soapish teen drama fix, I myself found fairly latched to this particular brand, solely for it's total dedication to being so damn nerdy, yet incredibly smart, with well written, witty as hell dialogue and solid fuckin addicting story lines.

The show could be basically summed up as a sexed up, t.v. version of Rian Johnson's Brick. The show is completely rooted in detective noir and long winded mystery. The first two seasons of the show followed one overarching mystery that lasted over the entire season. Teen sleuth Veronica Mars (the smoking fucking hot Kristen Bell) navigates through high school bullshit to solve these mysteries (the death of her best friend, her rape, and the death of a school bus load of her classmates) in a episodic narrative page turning fashion akin to shows like "Lost" and "Twin Peaks." Bell's sassy and sci-fi savy (she says "frak" a lot and makes a ton of BSG references...hot) detective is brainy, witty, and for once an intelligent, female protagonist; something that's usually hard to find with shows aimed at this demographic. It's fairly refreshing to watch.

Yet apparently the demographic looking for that sort of refreshing change in formulaic teen TV doesn't exist. UPN forced creator Rob Thomas to dumb down the shows mysteries for the third season. The result was mostly single contained, mystery of the week type episodes, rather than one awesome, long and engaging season long mystery. The show started airing sporadically, and was of course canceled before they could get a full third season in.

I highly recommend blazing through the first two seasons of this show if your looking for a good addicting TV fix. Let the heckling begin, I'm sure I'll address more embarrassing shit I enjoy in future blog entries.