This got extremely long. I didn’t get into things I would change, and I didn’t give any advice; nevertheless, I have a lot to say about Veronica Mars.
The long and the short of it is that a lot of people discuss Veronica Mars as though it is a noir TV show, but it’s not solely or even primarily a noir work. It’s certainly noir-inspired; many of its characters are drawn from noir archetypes; it’s cynical enough about the status quo to be noir; you might say that it’s in conversation with the noir genre. But although noir detective fiction has plenty of hardboiled detectives (Veronica), dirty cops (Lamb), and femme fatales (Logan), where in noir do we place Wallace? Where do we put Mac? Where does Keith go? What about Meg? What about Duncan? (Poor, poor Meg and Duncan.)
By the time it exited its first season, Veronica Mars was just full of too many bright, funny, fundamentally likeable characters—characters who you fundamentally could not suspect of murder—to be classifiable as fully noir. Moreover, the central mystery that it left dangling at the end of the first season wasn’t about murder, or corruption, or betrayal; it’s about romance. Who is at Veronica’s door? By the season one finale, Veronica Mars is first and foremost what it perhaps inevitably was going to become, when it aired on network television: an ensemble character drama.
Can an ensemble character drama be noir? Well, sure. Veronica Mars is. But in a long-term ensemble character-based show, the needs of the characters have to be served before the needs of the noir. People watched season one of Veronica Mars because they enjoyed the mystery (and the quips, and the romance). They kept watching because they connected with the characters.
Season one balanced those two needs nearly perfectly; that’s why it’s often held up as an all-time great season of television. Season two remains pretty noir (it is, after all, the season of the acquittal of Aaron Echolls), but the construction of its mystery gets overly complicated, and the personal plot—the character drama—tends towards soapy. It still balances well enough to be enjoyable, but it’s undeniable that there are problems with season two of Veronica Mars, and I think they come from trying to figure out how to incorporate the characters into an ongoing noir storyline. Wallace is simply not a noir character, but he gets sucked into a dead-end story about his missing father and a hit-and-run on a homeless guy for half a season. Duncan, once you establish that he’s not going to kill anyone in a blackout rage, is basically a bland, quiet, nice guy, and not in any way a noir character. So he has to go on the run with Meg’s (also not a noir character, therefore killed off) coma baby halfway through the season.
The basic construction of season two of Veronica Mars is that the cast from season one, now cleared of all suspicion in Lilly Kane’s murder, encounter a new noir mystery, populated by new noir characters: Woody and Gia Goodman and Jackie and Terrence Cook on the one hand, and Felix Toombs and the Fitzpatricks on the other. The main cast are organically enmeshed in this new noir set-up to varying degrees. Logan (who is perhaps the most naturally noir character of the show’s early seasons, above even Veronica) is fully integrated in the murder of Felix Toombs; he’s an obvious suspect, and although we don’t believe he did it, it’s understandable why everyone else thinks he did. Logan’s drive to clear his name (or at least stay out of jail) takes him to believable, if unlikeable, noir depths—which the show engages with! If the murder of Felix Toombs were the main focus of season two, it would probably be a pretty great focal point. But it’s not. The main mystery only touches Logan’s storyline for about one episode, where it’s a red herring, and the rest of the time Logan and the Fitzpatricks mostly operate in a parallel track, at best distracting from and at worst confusing the real plot.
The rest of the cast are involved in the main mystery, but their involvement is a tricky thing. Most of them weren’t on the bus when it crashed, or before it crashed. Most of them aren’t directly connected to the Sharks, or to the mayor’s incorporation plan. (Wow, season 2 has a lot of plates in the air.) Their connections are, by and large, second-hand. Wallace is dating Jackie. Mac is kind of dating Cassidy. Keith and Veronica just really like solving mysteries. And also Keith is running for sheriff I guess?
The thing is, those second-hand connections work to keep the show in the realm of noir. We don’t need Wallace to get involved in a hit-and-run, okay? He can just have a tempestuous and heartfelt but ultimately doomed relationship with a girl with a mysterious past. Duncan probably didn’t need to go on the run with Meg’s coma baby; he could’ve just like, gone to boarding school in Connecticut.
Season two is very aware that some of its characters are noir and some of them are not, because it leverages that fact to make the mystery work. Cassidy is on the bus, and then leaves before it crashes; Cassidy alone of the main cast is heavily connected to the incorporation storyline; Cassidy basically has a big red arrow pointing at him for five episodes leading up to the finale saying, “Hey, SOMETHING’S GOING ON WITH THIS GUY.” But Veronica never seriously considers him as a suspect, and the only reason that the viewer doesn’t (if they don’t) is because... it’s Beaver! Beaver’s not a murderer! Beaver’s not that kind of character. It’s kind of like how season one shows you Aaron Echolls beating a guy half to death, but plays “That’s Amore” over it, and you don’t realize you’re looking at a clue—or how The Good Place hid its first season twist simply by being a sitcom. If you don’t know what genre you’re operating in, it’s hard to be genre savvy.
But there’s a risk that comes with that kind of writing: No one was invested in Aaron Echolls, but I can imagine that someone might’ve been invested in Cassidy. I wasn’t, but someone might’ve been. He was in the main credits. He was dating Mac. In order to make season two’s mystery noir, and meaningful, and keep it connected to the main characters, they had to burn a character with some real work invested in him, and do so in a way that potentially broke faith with viewers who really liked that character and his relationships. (And that’s not even getting into the really unfortunate implications of the specific motivation and backstory they gave to Cassidy.)
Season three is just kind of a mess, for a lot of reasons. It’s not particularly noir; they’ve lost the overarching mystery, as well as the show’s central setting; they lean heavily into the character drama, but although Veronica Mars is an ensemble character drama, it’s not just an ensemble character drama, and it can’t and shouldn’t function without a mystery to sustain it. But more importantly, everyone’s a little out of character, so even if character drama were enough, I wouldn’t be all that interested in watching almost!Veronica get in her fifth fight with almost!Logan. That said, I think that leaning into character drama is a safer way to jump the shark than leaning into noir; at worst, the show is going to get messy and boring, which is basically what happens. And the ending of season three is a pretty bang-on noir ending, and falls out naturally from the weird, messy character drama. It’s not a good season of television, but there’s a reason that it didn’t destroy fans’ love of the show.
This is ~*unconventional*~, I know, but I like the movie, both as a fan and, when I try to step back and approach it somewhat objectively, as a critic. It is extraordinarily fanservice-y; I don’t think that’s a bad thing. There are, perhaps, fanservice moments that I find a little over-the-top. (One of them, alas, is the repetition of the “lives ruined, bloodshed” speech; Logan was drunk the first time he gave that, he doesn’t remember it, and that’s half the point!) But on the whole, the movie gets it. Logan and Weevil (and Gia, may she rest in peace) are inherently noir characters who you can insert into a mystery or a story about corruption or cynicism, and although we don’t want them to have done the big bad thing, they will operate smoothly within the confines of the system. Wallace and Mac are visitors from another genre; the make connections, they comment, their lives are sometimes affected, but they are not noir, and their stories should not be noir. Veronica and Keith are the pivot, constantly drawn into Neptune’s seedy network of crime, trying to root it out.
It’s basically the Logan-and-Fitzpatricks storyline from season two, but updated so that a) Veronica and the rest of the cast is actually involved, and b) Logan is a much more likeable person. And it turns out that that’s a totally solid engine for a movie! And because it’s so fanservice-y, we spend time with all of the characters, even the ones who aren’t really entangled in the noir plots. Mac gets stuff to do. Wallace gets stuff to do. Piz... gets... poor Piz.
Season four leans heavily on the noir. So heavily, in fact, that the characters who aren’t natural noir characters are virtually nonexistent within the season. Wallace doesn’t have a storyline; Mac doesn’t appear because Tina Majorino refused to be in the season, since she wouldn’t have a storyline. Weevil, whose noir tendencies have put him on the outs with Veronica in between the movie and season four, has a story, but it’s not one that’s heavily tied to the main plot, and he’s not around much.
Structurally, season four is similar to season two, in that the main cast encounters a new mystery full of noir characters: Patton Oswalt, Matty the mini-Veronica, that politician and his family, those cartel hit men, Veronica’s bartender friend Nicole. The difference is that in season four, the main cast has functionally been pared down to three people: Veronica, Logan, and Keith. Oh, and Dick. Dick’s still hanging around, I guess.
Because of that, we spend virtually all of our time in season four with Veronica. Sometimes a little with Logan, sometimes with Keith, but mostly Veronica. We see her making friends with Nicole; we see her taking on Matty as a protege. We see her fight with Weevil; we see her fight with Logan.
Oh boy, do we see her fight with Logan. Because there are so few subplots to distract from it, Logan and Veronica’s relationship is, in many ways, the story of season four. For a show trying so desperately hard to cling to noir and run from character drama, season four isn’t really about corruption; it isn’t about power; it isn’t about cynicism or brutality or the ways that Neptune has been and always will be bad. It’s about a relationship, and what happens to it when one person (Logan) is trying to move on to a healthier place, but the other person (Veronica) is still stuck in old, toxic patterns of behavior.
Nearly everything in season four is in some way about the Logan/Veronica dichotomy, or about their relationship with each other, or about the way that Veronica is pathologically stubborn and guarded and suspicious, and how that kills her relationships. It’s the thematic underpinning of the Matty storyline; it’s what the Nicole storyline turns on; it is, whether the show understands it or not, the devastating backdrop of the few scenes in which Weevil appears.
This is all fine and noir, but again: It comes to its fullest fruition, it finds its highest stakes, the season’s arc reaches its climax, in a romantic relationship. Which the season is, fundamentally, devoted to the psychological exploration of. And when Veronica decides that she can commit to marrying Logan, that is a key moment of character development, in a show that has historically been an ensemble character drama, in a season of television that has been, at least for Logan and Veronica, at least partially a psychological character drama.
And look, I am not opposed to killing characters. I’ve defended the death of Lexa on The 100 on this here very blog. But Logan’s death is 1) stupid, 2) at a stupid time, and 3) for a stupid reason. He dies moving the car across the street, just at the culmination of a major psychological arc about toxicity and moving on and opening yourself up to others... so that Veronica can stay toxic and guarded, I guess?
It renders any character development we’ve seen from Veronica in season 4 pointless. It cuts the character development we’ve seen from Logan for over a decade tragically and meaninglessly short. And it does it all in the name of taking a hard turn into “pure” noir, so that Veronica can go investigate mysteries in other towns, unencumbered by a troublesome cast that viewers are unwilling to suspect of murder.
The problem is that that cast is a lot of what’s good about the show. Maybe there are people who watched season four of Veronica Mars and came out of it thinking, “Ah, yes, what this show needs is even less of the ensemble cast,” but I was not one of them. The Veronica of season 4 is not a particularly likeable person. Veronica, on her own, was never all that likeable; what she was was funny, and understandable, and righteous, and decent. She had people around her to be likeable, to provide you with an entry point into her mind, to show interesting sides of her you might not otherwise see, to call her out when she crossed a line, and to give the show a lightness that made it fun. The bomb that blew up Logan may have made the loudest noise, and had the most final impact, but it wasn’t what killed season four; that happened when the writers sidelined Wallace.
It is, I’m sure, difficult to balance being an ensemble character drama with being a seasonal noir mystery. (Jane the Virgin ran into similar trouble, in the long run, balancing being an ensemble character drama with being a telenovela.) Nevertheless, Veronica Mars is both of these things, and blowing up the ensemble to service the noir is inevitably going to alienate viewers, because viewers have a reasonable expectation that the shows they’re watching will continue to be the same general kind of show. And because many viewers were drawn to Veronica Mars at least as much for the characters as for the mystery.
So my very, very longwinded opinion on the later seasons of Veronica Mars is that I think the show has an identity crisis, and I don’t think it’s going to resolve it any time soon. It may not be resolvable; honestly, television might not be the best medium for ongoing Veronica Mars stories at this point. But I have very little interest in watching any further seasons produced, so it doesn’t matter much, from my point of view.
