I frequently and emphatically recommend Veronica Mars to anyone who happens to mention they haven’t had the chance to see it. It’s one of those series where the first season is absolutely brilliant, the second season hangs in there, and the third season kind of falls flat. I tend to assume that this is sometimes inevitable, that series naturally deteriorate over time, and this one’s decline just happened to come a bit quickly.
After lending out my DVDs of season 1 to a friend, I took some time looking back at the first few episodes and it occurred to me: It’s not that season 3 fails utterly, it’s that it fell from such a height!
The question for this series is, how was season 1 so spectacular?! Here’s my suggestion:
The first year of Veronica Mars maximizes its engrossing narrative by telling two years worth of stories in one. The present timeline, Veronica’s spunky, hard-boiled, intriguing, junior year of high school, is peppered with flashbacks to the year past. On the surface these provide clues to the season’s over-arching mystery (who killed Lilly Kane?), but they also offer fantastic juxtapositions between two states of being in high school.
The flashbacks are washed in a glow of golden-age nostalgia, where life was simpler, where stories were about popularity and dating and friendship. In short, the flashbacks tell the kind of story common in all sorts of teen drama. Mashed up with a brilliant and innovative teen detective series, set against the current, harsher (and really, more interesting) reality, the season is absolutely bursting with wonderful stories, maximizing every second of possible narrative development.
This effective use of flashbacks, I believe, are the key to what makes this show (and the first season in particular) so extraordinary. They provide the chance to tell multiple stories at once. They show the audience character depth and development in unique and interesting ways. And, they manage to succinctly demonstrate how this show is so different from the average teen show, by literally showing us how far Veronica has come, how much things can change, in just one year.
[…] Veronica Mars is framed by grief. The show’s premise and mystery arc, which I’ve also previously discussed, is based on the murder of a girl who was loved by many of the main cast – her brother, her best […]