At first blush, Veronica Mars seems like a weird choice for a late-2010s revival. The series, which ran for three seasons to poor ratings in the mid-2000s, doesn’t have the most vocal fanbase on the internet, nor the largest. While series headliner Kristen Bell has definitely gotten more prominent in the decade since, she’s really the only member of the core cast whose career subsequently blew up, so unlike, say, Freaks and Geeks, you likewise can’t really attribute the show’s legacy to a legendary cast. Instead, I’d argue that Veronica Mars stayed relevant because it was a uniquely prescient show, a teen drama the predicted the social and political atmosphere of the nation over a decade before just about any other mainstream TV series.
“This is my school. If you go here, either your parents are millionaires or your parents work for millionaires. Neptune, California: A town without a middle class.”
Early in the show’s (admittedly weak) pilot, Veronica introduces us to her school – and her town – with two lines that set the tone of what was to come. What does it mean, in the show’s reality, to be a town of such staggering wealth inequality? Throughout the pilot, we’re introduced to a series of broken families, gangs, cops, and cold cases that, at the time, made the series seem borderline dystopian. Take Neptune’s finest. In just the pilot, the police:
- dismiss a sexual assault survivor
- mock a potential victim of gang violence
- botch the massive case at the series’ core
- are completely in the pocket of the town’s rich white families
None of this is new to the neo-noir genre, but it’s startling how rare this is on TV. Veronica Mars is not an ACAB show; Veronica’s father is the former sheriff, she has one love interest who is a cop, and another cop gets a face-turn late in the series. But the show does recognize the fault in the ‘one bad apple’ defense of bad cops. The bad apple spoils the bunch. He recruits bad cops. He trains them poorly. And, slowly but surely, he undermines the entire system of law enforcement in the town.
Veronica Mars was, in a very real way, the first mainstream TV show to understand that we’re living in Noir Times. We watch crooked cops kill with impunity, protecting the property of the ultra-rich as they work the system to turn a hundred million into just a tiny bit more, the rest of us fighting for scraps beneath the table. Our day-to-day political reality is one of corruption, theft, and inequality, and Veronica Mars reflected that with remarkable insight.
That’s not to say the show is perfect, of course.
“Okay, say you and your buddy buy a 12-pack of spark plugs…”
The defining flaw of Veronica Mars was and remains its treatment of race. In the first season, damn near every Latino character we meet is part of a motorcycle gang. The PCH (Pacific Coast Highway) gang is at the center of every Weevil story for the first two seasons. While Weevil, who eventually leaves the gang, gets some character development throughout the show, he’s the only one. This issue gets worse in the fourth season’s go-nowhere Mexican cartel story. Season four doesn’t just undermine Weevil, it recasts the rest of the show’s depiction of Latinx characters more negatively.
It makes sense that people of color in Neptune are largely treated as invisible by the city elites. But Veronica isn’t one of the elites. So why is it that she so rarely works with or for them? Why are there more good, well-rounded rich white kids than Latinx characters? Than any people of color?
Part of the issue is that the show is, well… really white. While the writers on those first two seasons were pretty evenly split between men and women, they were overwhelmingly white. It shows. The depth and specificity of Veronica’s experience is incredible. But Wallace? Even Dick Casablancas, a one-note joke character for nearly two seasons, is ultimately given a fuller story than Weevil or Wallace. Don’t even get me started on Jackie.
Ultimately, Veronica Mars is insightful about class, but blind about race. It’s a genuinely tragic flaw, deeply set, and I understand why it turns some viewers off. The first two seasons of Veronica Mars are, in my opinion, among the finest seasons of TV ever, but they are far from perfect.
“Dad always said this town could wreck a person. It’s what happens when you’re playing a rigged game. I convinced myself that winning meant getting out, but in what world do you get to leave the ring and declare victory? This is where I belong: In the fight.”
Veronica Mars, the 2014 film, nails the series’ appeal with those final lines.
The state of the world today often leaves me feeling hopeless. Radical income inequality and systemic racism and sexism are persistent problems, but they’re persistent problems our current fairly conservative media environment struggles to even portray, let alone critique. While that’s getting better, thanks in part to an excellent crop of shows like Netflix’s One Day at a Time, NBC’s Superstore, and CBS All-Access’ The Good Fight, it’s still pretty rare. Veronica isn’t a superhero, and she isn’t winning easy victories. But she is fighting. And there’s an undeniable thrill to watching someone smart, fearless, and utterly dismissive of the wealthy win some tough battles with wits alone.
Veronica Mars is a flawed show. Of its four seasons, the third is profoundly misogynistic and the fourth abandons the excellent mystery-of-the-week structure for something blander. Its pilot is weak. It has issues with race throughout, and with sexual violence. Those are all valid, powerful critiques.
And yet, Veronica fights. There’s something powerful to me about someone who sees the state of the world clearly and still fights. That fight is why Veronica Mars still matters to me.
Veronica Mars is currently streaming on Hulu, with its fourth season released earlier in 2019.