Veronica Mars cancelled

All right, apparently I'm late to this party, but it's shitty that the CW pulled the plug on Veronica Mars. Apparently, creator Rob Thomas had pitched a possible story jump arc for next season which would leave the rest of Veronica's college career to the imagination, and jump forward to Veronica's first year at the FBI academy. Unfortunately, it looks like they didn't go for it.

A shame really, that we're not going to get to see Veronica at the Academy, but I have to say the college thing wasn't going so well. Havrilesky is right: Veronica's better than finding the lost football playbook. When the show was based in high school, it was tapping into the long line of great high school shows like Freaks and Geeks and, to some extent, The Wonder Years. The drama on those shows could be ramped up so high because we forgive teenagers their trespasses into the realm of hysterics because they are, first and foremost, the most solipsistic creatures on the planet. Rob Thomas crafted the stories for the first two years out of a fantastic blend of real world tragedy (Lilly's murder, the bus crash) and social anxiety (Veronica's balancing act at Neptune High's periphery, her everyday problems with relationships), conflating and equating the two in the process, and you believed it. Thomas was very much in touch with the way high schoolers have this sense that everything happens to them, and are never very good at telling the difference between a real disaster and their own problems.

Witness the way Logan stumbled again and again into trouble without ever learning his lesson. When he was a senior in high school, it was almost endearing to the viewers, even as it was alternately threatening and seductive to Veronica. Now that he's in college, though? His puppy dog eyes and inability to man up have worn thin.

And then there's Veronica herself, a character in the model of Jimmy McNulty from the Wire in that she's amazingly good at her job--taking her job as sleuthing, getting revenge and doing it all while looking great--and absolutely abysmal at personal relationships. She keeps being drawn to the bad boys, and even when she isn't--that is, when she was with Duncan or during her current dalliance with Piz--she's clearly ill-suited to them. It's a masterful tone that's been struck in the series: she's a classic perfectionist who's completely out of her element when forced to yield to someone else's needs and desires.

If you haven't yet, you should really check out the series on DVD. Season 1is maybe the better of the two, although Season 2does have a couple of the best episodes, like the one where Wallace and Veronica visit Hearst College.

To make this at least somewhat music-related, I should mention that VM has always done a great job with music. Britt Daniel from Spoon appeared as a cafe customer who sings a karaoke version of "Veronica" by Elvis Costello and they've also championed (albeit slyly) the music of Austin's Cotton Mather, a band that put out one absolutely killer album called Kontikiback in 1997. It's just about the best slice of Beatles-tinged indie psychedlia you could imagine, with Robert Harrison's lyrical world populated by strange characters like Aurora Bori Alice and places like the Church of Wilson. They first popped up in VM at the end of the first season, where their song "Lily Dreams On" played over the last scene, and then they popped up again two weeks ago. Paul Rudd appeared as a quasi-washed up rocker who was still peddling the songs written by his dead bandmate when he came to Hearst College to play a show. Of course, the tapes he used as backing tracks (well, they were CDs, actually) were stolen and Veronica had to find them. When she did, they included a disc labeled "New Crap," and when she put it on, what should come out but a re-recorded version of "My Before and After" by--you got it--Cotton Mather.

Robert Harrison is currently playing with a group called Future Clouds and Radar, and I just got their CD last week. Expect a review soon.

[sigh] I'll miss Vron-vron. Personally, I think it's all the fault of that ridiculous outfit they made Kristen Bell wear for the promos.