Veronica Mars

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Op woensdag 23 februari 2005 12:30 schreef SuperSiem het volgende:
Ik ben erg benieuwd naar deze serie, maar de eerste afleveringen zijn erg lastig te vinden. Kan ik met een gerust hart nu beginnen met kijken, of is er net zoals bij bijv. Buffy en Angel een seizoenlange, overkoepelende verhaallijn waar ik nu dus al meer de helft van heb gemist?

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Op donderdag 24 februari 2005 00:38 schreef Lamon het volgende:

[..]

Nee, je moet echt vanaf aflevering 1 kijken inderdaad. Er is namelijk niet 1 overkoepelende verhaallijn, er zijn er sowieso al drie en misschien wel meer. Zelfs Buffy seizoen 5 en Angel seizoen 4 waren nog relatief makkelijk te volgen vanaf latere momenten in het seizoen denk ik.
Als je nu zou beginnen, zou er veel te veel aan je voorbij gaan.

Het is een serie waarin details belangrijk zijn en meerdere verhaallijnen door elkaar lopen. In de laatste aflevering waren er 4 verschillende verhaallijnen, die overigens allemaal in dezelfde aflevering tot een climax of oplossing kwamen.

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How Veronica Mars Became a Girl, but Not a Hit
(Tuesday, March 15 02:39 PM)
By Daniel Fienberg



LOS ANGELES (Zap2it.com) Not to question the infinite and apparently universal appeal of men who like to wear diapers, starving children or deceased Sherlock Holmes fans, but there's something disconcerting about the fact that nearly 11 times more people watch CBS' "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation" on a weekly basis than tune in to UPN's "Veronica Mars." The viewership gap between television's most popular crime drama and one of its most criminally neglected is some 24 million folks per week, a statistic that would never come to mind looking around the crowded Directors Guild of America Theatre during Monday (March 14) night's session of the William S. Paley Television Festival.

"This is about the size of our viewing audience," executive producer Joel Silver noted.

Despite the ever-present awareness that it may take a minor miracle for "Veronica Mars" to return next season, optimism was still in the air at Monday's event. Rob Thomas, the show's creator, told the crowd that he had spent the day with his writing staff breaking stories for a possible second season and moderator Cynthia Littleton ended the panel discussion by telling the crowd to swamp Les Moonves with letters of support, going so far as to give the Viacom bigwig's address.

Rather than dwelling on negligible Nielsens and a foggy future, the evening's discussion mostly centered how a show about a teenage gumshoe with traumatic backstory made it on television in the first place. In the beginning, Thomas explained, "Veronica Mars" was conceived as a young adult novel focusing on a male protagonist. That project went nowhere. Thomas, whose credits include "Cupid" and a stint writing for "Dawson's Creek," wanted to create a primetime soap, but in the wake of the early cancellation of "Freaks and Geeks," he realized that a genre hook might be necessary to get networks interests. Even after the detective aspects were enhanced and the hero underwent a sexual reassignment, the "Veronica Mars" script languished in Thomas' desk until a basic meeting with UPN execs revealed that the netlet was hoping to rebrand with a focus on young female viewers. Thomas figured his show, which he describes as "teen life through a noir lens," would be perfect. The 21st Century Nancy Drew got an extra boost with the casting of Bell, a relatively unknown actress.

"I never read any Nancy Drew," Bell admits. "I wish I had been obsessed with Nancy Drew growing up. It would have been great for the show."

What Bell, one of the small screen's unsung heroes, responded to was the mixture of toughness and vulnerability in Veronica, as well as a unique overall voice that mixed hard-boiled crime fiction with the always emotional, frequently sarcastic, but rarely glib cadences of genuine high schoolers, specifically teen girls.

"That voice is him," cracks Silver, looking over at Thomas. "He's the young girl voice."

Thomas, who spent five years as a high school journalism teacher offers both his own defense and a bit of advice for the tin-eared purveyors of teen dialogue.

"If you want to write teenage girls, advise a high school yearbook for five years," he says.

Merely capturing the battle for status and security in a high school that combines a volatile mixture of races and economic classes would have been enough of a challenge and tossing in a crime-of-the-week genre format has occasionally seemed complicated matters. But what has endeared "Veronica Mars" to its tiny, but passionate following, is the complex mythology that involves the murder of Veronica's best friend, the unexplained departure of her mother and her date rape.

"It's a bitch," Thomas admits. "It takes us nearly as long to break an episode as to write it."

Thomas has promised all season that many of the show's most important mysteries will be solved by the season finale. That episode will drop the crime-of-the-week structure and concentrate entirely on lingering questions in the death of Lilly Kane. The season's penultimate episode will provide some answers regarding Veronica's date rape. That episode will feature some flashback footage to the aftermath of the rape that was shot for the original pilot, but had to be edited out because of fears that the material might be too intense or dark for uninitiated viewers. The season will reach a climax that Thomas claims he's been building two from the beginning.

"I knew the ending from before the series was ordered and I had a vague idea when I was writing the pilot," he says.

The fate of "Veronica Mars" won't be sealed until UPN makes its upfront presentation to advertisers in May, but until that time, producers will keep doing everything possible to stir up new viewers.

"We're just trying to keep people knowing that the show's there," Silver says.

BRON: ZAP2IT.COM

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Op zaterdag 9 april 2005 13:18 schreef Lamon het volgende:
Veronica Mars krijgt een tweede seizoen ondanks de matige kijkcijfers!

Mooi zo, kwaliteit boven kwantiteit. That's a first.