Tag: Veronica Mars

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Saw a commercial for the upcoming Nancy Drew movie. Apparently they don’t think they can sell the character as a teenage detective. They’re selling her as a makeover story, pulling the same fish-out-of-water concept used for the Brady Bunch films.

Admittedly I haven’t read the books, but I did go through a phase as a teen when I read all the Hardy Boys books I could find, including crossovers between the two series. The then-current books weren’t all set in the 1920s, and they weren’t about the title characters being anachronisms. They were updated for modern audiences. Modern techniques. Modern equipment. I remember one book in which Frank and Joe end up training for a mission on the space shuttle.

Logically, Nancy Drew should be enmeshed in the world of cell phones, bugs, web research, and spy cameras. Veronica Mars without the angst. Making her an old-fashioned fixer-upper is missing the point of the character, and turns her into a metatextual parody of herself.

But then, if VM’s ratings and cancellation are anything to go by, today’s audiences don’t actually want to see a story about a modern teenage girl detective. And makeovers, extreme or otherwise, are what’s popular.

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As Veronica Mars approached the end of its third season, the show prepared for two possible futures. They could pick up a fourth season where they left off, with Veronica still in college, or they could jump forward a few years to the start of her career as an FBI agent. They even prepared a trailer demonstrating the possible new direction.

Well, the CW decided to pass on both possibilities and canceled the show. Some good news, though: TV Shows On DVD is reporting that the Season 3 DVD set will include the trailer for the FBI revamp. At least we’ll have a chance to see what could have been.

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(Lost)Here’s a surprise: Lost has been renewed for a three-season deal… but each season is only 16 episodes long. The writers are glad that they have an endpoint, because now they know how long they have to tell the rest of the story they have in mind. (Call me credulous, but I’m inclined to believe that they do have at least some of their plans worked out ahead of time.)

Though I have to say, I hope they’ve checked their contract for loopholes. Farscape thought they had a two-season deal, so they took their characters and story to some really dark places in Season 4, figuring they had another year to dig them out. Instead they got canceled, and it took a fan campaign and the sale of the Jim Henson company to get even a four-hour miniseries to wrap things up.

As for the structure, this is actually probably better than two 24-episode seasons. It makes it easier to show an entire season through without interruptions. This season’s schedule, with just 6 episodes at the beginning followed by months of reruns, was terrible. Of course, once they came back from hiatus, it was much better than the sporadic episodes they showed in Season 2.

Arc vs. Scheduling

This brings up a problem with trying to run a TV series with an arc to it: Scheduling can seriously mess it up.

Babylon 5 suffered from PTEN’s decision to hold the last four episodes of each season until fall, followed immediately by the following season. It undermined the season-ending cliffhangers, and broke the narrative in the middle. Eventually they started anticipating it: JMS would write a mini-cliffhanger five episodes before the end of the season, and in one case even wrote a recap into the script for episode 19.

Veronica Mars and Heroes have done a good job this year of breaking the season into mini-arcs that match the schedule. Veronica Mars had a 9-part mystery, followed by a 6-part mystery, followed by a series of one-shots at the end of the season, and each arc was shown without interruption.

Heroes told the initial “Save the Cheerleader, Save the World” storyline, followed it up with some backstory, and finished the first run with a teaser for the main arc for the rest of the season. (Heroeswiki breaks it down further, by tagline.) The second arc deepened the plot, and brought everything to a high point: the revelation of Linderman’s and Bennett’s agendas, plus cliffhangers in Hiro’s and Peter’s journeys. Now we’re in the home stretch. As the tagline says, “It’s time to save the world.”

That seems to be the way to go: If you don’t have the clout to change the schedule (like 24), find some way to work within it. Plowing straight through without regard to when the episodes are going to be shown, like Lost did with Season 2, is just going to frustrate your audience.

(Thanks to aeryncrichton for the news!)