After 10 years, Veronica Mars is back in the news and on the big screen with a Kickstarter-funded movie. But back in 2005, noir author Gary Phillips was quite taken with the surprisingly sophisticated charms of this teenage TV sleuth.
Maybe I am a girly man, as my Governator Arh-nald might say, but I dig the Veronica Mars TV show. Tuesday nights, me and my 16-year-old daughter Chelsea carve out some couch time and groove on this hip post-deconstructionist Nancy Drew and her adventures in small-town snooping. What makes this show work for me is not simply that its creator and exec producer, Rob Thomas, draws on just enough of that Smallville-by-way-of-Dawson’s Creek vibe to hook the youth, but the subterranean current flowing underneath the overarching story line comes straight from Ross Macdonald.
Whether this is intentional I can’t say. But having pitched a couple of TV shows in my time, one doesn’t imagine Mr. Thomas invoked Mr. Macdonald in his first meeting with the suits. Pilates-obsessed Hollywood execs don’t exactly have deep filmic history let alone a feel for Mr. Macdonald’s work. For, alas, the teller of the Lew Archer tales retains a following, but is not burning up the bestseller lists.
It seems today Macdonald is best known to the fellow writers who have been inspired by his work and his ability to harness the mercurial factor, a factor Mr. Thomas and sundry writers employ on Veronica Mars.
The outline for a TV program usually includes the log line, that is, the one sentence that describes the show, plus the backstory—who the characters are, the arena, and what might be the initial episodes. Essentially this is the closer, the pages you leave behind or send over after you’ve made your verbal pitch to whomever can advance your idea from being just that, an idea.
Let’s take for example the recent clunker Hawaii. No, not the book and film of that name from the James Michner novel, but the cop show that came and went this past fall on NBC. While it wasn’t a hip post-deconstructionist Hawaii 5-0, it wasn’t much else either. None of the characters seemed distinct one from another, though there was a running gag about how one of the crew transplanted from the mainland (the black guy I might add) couldn’t swim. There was some nod to local culture as one of the episodes had to do with ritualistic killings, but as I heard a writer once say, there was nothing more there than what was on the page. And what was on the page was far too pedestrian.
Back then to Macdonald, the premise, and the execution of Veronica Mars. Neptune, California, like Macdonald’s Santa Theresa, is an emotion-laden Sargasso that the respective protagonists must wade through in their quests. The abusive actor father, the rich man who cajoles his son to follow in his footsteps, the mother who fakes her own death but leaves behind a clue for her son—all about the corrosive secrets and lies that eat at the family from within.
The point here is the writer not only conveys the facts, but must command the feel of who the characters are and what it is about them that will have us coming back for more. What’s there between the lines, the elusive mercurial factor. You can put down the external and internal factoids of the characters, how they interact, what secrets they have or hold over one another. But that thing that makes them pop off the page? That’s the hard part, the part that demands rewriting, honing, and jettisoning precious passages.
“Resourceful, sarcastic 17-year-old female outcast is this era’s Nancy Drew” might be the log line of Veronica Mars. But is that enough to get you to read more, to see the potential of a series built around a character like Veronica?
Macdonald said of Lew Archer, “If he turned sideways, he’d disappear.” Maybe that’s what has made Archer so hard to capture on TV and film. He is known but unknown. The trick is how to convey that in what is said or not, what’s in the detective’s head (Veronica Mars employs voice-over, the Lew Archer books were first person), gestures, looks, the details that tell so much.
Clearly in terms of TV and film, a lot depends on the actors, but there’s got to be enough there on the page for them to grasp, to build on and bring to life. And for the reader, that also holds true for them to bring your characters to life in their heads.
Veronica is played by the bright and just-sexy-enough 24-year-old-playing-17, Kristen Bell. I first noticed her as the less-than-righteous sister half of a con team put to death by Powers Booth’s venal saloon owner Cy Tolliver in Deadwood. And Enrico Colantoni, the photographer in Just Shoot Me, is her ex-sheriff father who is now a PI. He plays Keith Mars (no relation to Eddie Mars from The Big Sleep I presume) in an understated but convincing way.
It’s established in the first episode that Veronica was once one of the popular girls at Neptune High. Her best friend, sister of her rich boyfriend, is murdered. Pops Mars, then the sheriff, suspects the rich father is the culprit. Due to the man’s position, and another man confessing to the murder, the backlash has the senior Mars recalled from office and thus he hangs out his private eye shingle. Then Veronica’s mom takes off, for reasons unknown at that point, and Veronica wakes up after being drugged at a party and she may or may not have been raped. Whew!
Despite the confession of the supposed killer, the thing that drives Veronica is finding out who really murdered her best friend, Lilly Kane. From that as our touchstone, the Macdonald-esque twists of familial intrigue manifest. In any episode the A story line may be about Veronica helping a kid find his lost father (who’s had a sex change and is now a woman) or bust a secret school society. But the B story line—the overarching one—is her seeking the bigger truth of who murdered Lilly.
Veronica’s digging uncovers clues that her mother was possibly having an affair, and that her dad may not be her biological dad. And for reasons held close, he’s backed off of looking into the Lilly Kane matter.
This prying young woman uses people to get information and often this is discovered and causes her to pay a psychological toll. This gives the show a certain edge, and it keeps her as an outcast, the wiseass who through her manipulations becomes harder and more cynical, an observer of the human drama but less and less a participant.
A Gen Y Lew Archer?
I don’t know. I don’t even know at the time of this writing if the freshman show has been spared the axe. My daughter and I hope so. Veronica Mars has it’s goofiness (who the hell believes that Weevil, the Chicano leader of the local gang would still be in school?), but it’s a show that combusts with the mercurial factor to concoct some good yarns.
This article first appeared in Mystery Scene Spring Issue #89.
