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[seekingferret]

The talk about the Veronica Mars kickstarter got me to exploring the possibility of actually watching the show, and I discovered the first two seasons are streaming on the WB website. I'm halfway through Season 1.

I love Veronica. I've seen Kristen Bell in Heroes and House of Lies, so I already knew how versatile and interesting an actress she is, but Veronica really gives her so much room to play around. The flashback scenes let her show how different a person Veronica was before the show. And her disguises and costumes let her try out different new versions of herself.

I love Veronica and Keith together. I love Wallace and Weevil and I haven't seen enough of Mac to know I'll love her, but right now I like her a lot.

I just... I wish sometimes it weren't so heavy-handed. I'm not sure that's the word I'm looking for. The self-conscious storytelling and the attention to detail of plotting are great things that I always look for in a show, but they're foregrounded and blatant instead of naturalistic and integrated. It's very "ooh look at me, we're doing noir!" This show ought to be better than that. It should trust its audience more than it does, to recognize the clever things it is doing, since it is definitely doing clever things.



In other news, I keep making all the TSCC vids. It is kind of crazy how many I have in process at the moment, given that I just posted my first vid two months ago. I'm hitting the sweet spot with this show where I'm building up a solid ability to recall the episodes where shots exist. Vidding, when I have an idea, goes really fast. I built one vidlet in a single evening. I can't wait for all the vids from this fest to go live, and then I think and I realize that it's like a month and a half away... I'm really disoriented by being this ahead on an exchange. What happened to last minute panicking?

Comments

[kass]

Oh, I love S1 of Veronica Mars. Kristen Bell is fantastic, and so is Enrico Colantoni. And I love Weevil and Logan and Wallace and Mac a lot. The latter part of the season is a real roller coaster ride. (We just re-watched it, so it's fresh in my mind.) I hope you continue to dig it.

[cahn]

Oh, I really love Veronica Mars! Kristen Bell is amazing. Veronica and Keith are wonderful. Wallace is awesome.

Hmm. I hadn't thought of it that way. *thinks* I think part of it is having a chip on its shoulder about the "Nancy Drew, in high school, doing noir." I certainly know that when I was convinced to watch it, that was how my friend presented it to me, and I was highly skeptical. Some of it may, honestly, be Rob Thomas; I read his books, which I didn't like very much even though Veronica Mars is one of my favorite TV shows ever, and although I couldn't really articulate what I didn't like about the books, I think it was maybe this same kind of thing.

The pilot was sooooo dark that she had to reassure me that the rest of it was not that dark before I would watch any more of it :)

Have you watched The Good Wife at all? I have no idea whether you'd like it; our tastes in visual media vary so very much that I can't speculate, but when I started watching it, I said, "This is like Veronica Mars for grownups!" TGW doesn't have the precision microplotting (which I love) of VM, but it does rich characterization and morally complicated with a much more deft hand than VM. (That being said, I recced it to the friend who recced me VM, and she didn't like it, so...)

[seekingferret]

TGW was just added to Amazon Prime, and I watched the first two episodes with a lot of pleasure, but then I got into VM and haven't gotten any further.

I think cleverness of the kind VM pulls off is very rare on TV, and I'm not surprised that the creators had a chip on their shoulder about the difficulty of selling the premise. But sometimes I wish they just trusted their audience a little more.