‘Veronica Mars’ return missing some teen magic
“Veronica Mars,” which ran for three seasons on UPN and CW from 2004 to 2007, has become the zombie of entertainment franchises: revived using Kickstarter for a 2014 feature film, and now revived again for an eight-episode fourth season on Hulu.
Season 4 was shockreleased Friday, a week ahead of schedule, and like the film (also called “Veronica Mars”), it reunites the central cast, which has stuck with the story across 15 years.
Kristen Bell is Veronica, the cynical daddy’s girl and tough California beach-town private eye. Enrico Colantoni is Keith Mars, her wry father and mentor, banged up and fearing dementia after the conclusion of the film. And Jason Dohring is back as Logan Echolls, her bad-boy boyfriend, now a naval intelligence officer whose absences on secret missions supply the relationship angst formerly fueled by teenage moodiness and violence.
These three and some regular supporting players solve a mystery — who’s setting off bombs targeting spring breakers in Neptune, the home base of Mars Investigations — while enacting the show’s familiar, and still entertaining, lightly comic spin on hard-boiled noir.
We’re not in high school anymore, though, and Veronica's nostalgia for a simpler time may be paralleled by the viewer’s nostalgia for the immediate pleasures of the show’s splendid first season. Do we need more “Veronica Mars,” even if it continues to arrive in pleasing packages?
Opening during Veronica’s junior year at Neptune High, the series originally stood out for its clever and literate writing and the superior performances of Bell, Colantoni and Dohring. (Rob Thomas, the show’s creator, still oversees it and wrote the new season’s first and last episodes.) It was perhaps even more unusual for the way it presented a teenage world from a wised-up, adult point of view and with a fully adult emotional sensibility.
The adult intelligence is still there, and Bell and Colantoni are still wonderful together. But Thomas hasn’t found a really satisfactory replacement for the show’s loss of teen spirit.
It’s also a problem that the streamingseason model entails stretching a single mystery over close to eight hours. That’s new for “Veronica Mars” — the network seasons had long-arc mysteries, but they were broken up by lighter standalone cases throughout their 22 episodes.
Still, whenever the love story starts to drag or the mystery gets irritatingly convoluted, and despite an abrupt (and seemingly convenient) late detour into tragedy, “Veronica Mars” finds ways to charm you. Bell’s sparkle — no one does pluckiness better or funnier — and Colantoni’s utterly relaxed, jazzlike timing are givens.
The season also benefits from the addition of a pair of performers whose contrasting styles speak to the show’s blend of genres: Patton Oswalt, bringing his nervous screwball energy to the role of a pizza deliveryman and amateur sleuth, and J.K. Simmons, supplying noirish menace and cool as an aging ex-con and fixer who sees a soul mate in Keith.
Whether we needed another installment of “Veronica Mars” or not, there are more than enough reasons not to miss it now that it’s here.