Veronica Mars: The Complete Second Season
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DVD details
Actor: Kristen BellBrand: Warner Brothers
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround; Spanish (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround
Format: Box set, Color, Subtitled
Picture Format: 1.78:1
Running Time: 1012 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2006-08-22
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: Warner Home Video
DVD Reviews of Veronica Mars: The Complete Second Season
DVD Review: An already great show gets even better
Summary: 5 Stars
NEWS UPDATE -- May 16, 2006: Mike Ausiello of TV Guide has just posted that Rob Thomas e-mailed him that VERONICA MARS has been renewed for a third season and a full 22-episode order, that can be cut back to 13 if the ratings are low. So get this DVD box set if you are a fan! Lend it to friends! Recruit new viewers! Keep this great show alive!
In its first season, VERONICA MARS established itself as one of the best new shows on TV and while it didn't attract many viewers, it nonetheless managed to gain a surprising amount of critical acclaim. First, Salon.com, in its annual salute on the best show neglected by the Emmys, awarded the Buffy (named for the most unjustly Emmy-neglected show of all time) to VERONICA MARS. Then, BUFFY's creator, Joss Whedon, wrote a review in Entertainment Weekly of the DVD release of VM. His memorable three-word summation: "Best. Show. Ever." Finally, at the end of 2005 a host of TV critics gave their lists of the Top Five or Top Ten or just Top shows on TV. Right there among shows like LOST and ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT was that Veronica show. And it deserved all the praise. As great as it had been in its first season, its second represented a great leap forward in the complexity of its narrative and the development of its characters.
Unfortunately, what VERONICA MARS did not get was viewers. Despite the fact that pretty much the same people who would love VERONICA were those who love the mega-hit LOST, the geniuses at UPN decided to put this lovely show, which was still attempting to build an audience, against one of the highest rated shows on TV, targeted at much of the same group of people. There have been some astonishingly dumb decisions in the history of TV programming, but this definitely ranks up there. The results were predetermined: very few people watched VERONICA MARS. My two favorite shows on TV are VERONICA MARS and LOST. Weekly I was left with a dilemma. But let me confess this: after the halfway point in the season and before they moved VERONICA to Tuesdays, I found myself watching VERONICA MARS instead of LOST.
Season Two largely centered around the mystery of what caused a bus crash in the very first episode, a bus crash that killed several of Veronica's classmates and a bus that Veronica would have been on except by sheer accident. Though there are a host of story arcs throughout the season, this is the central one around which the season as a whole is built. What delighted me was the wonderful complexity that evolved during the course of the year. One plausible culprit after another was introduced, one new clue after another, so that one week it seemed definite that one person was responsible for the crash, but another the following week. All the way up to the end I was concerned that perhaps things were getting too complex, but in the end things were resolved in wonderful fashion.
In particular I want to praise two episodes. The finale, "Not Pictured," was one of the finest season finales I have ever seen. There was a new shocker of some sort every five minutes to go with some of the most gut wrenching moments I have ever witnessed on TV. There were many moments that were almost too horrible to watch, so intense they were. The episode no only resolved the major plot arcs of Season Two, but also some unresolved ones from Season One. All in all, it was a thing of glory. I was also amazed by the episode "Donut Run," in which Veronica matches wits with not only Sheriff Lamb (who is supposed to be an opening credits character in Season Three) but with two FBI agents, one of whom was portrayed by none other than Xena herself, Lucy Lawless. I indicated that I was going to keep this relatively spoiler free so I won't go into details, but I found this one of the most moving, exciting, delightful, and heart breaking episodes I've seen on TV. And it ends with a nod to its competitor in the same time slot, LOST, by ending with a close up of a note from a fortune cookie, which has just below the fortune Hurley's numbers: 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42. On a similar note, two of my favorite shows had nods towards one another this season. On one of the final episodes of the comic masterpiece ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT, George Michael asks Maebe if she would like to go watch [BLEEP] on TV. A subtitle explains that FOX had censored the name of a show on another network about a teen female detective. A few weeks later, on the episode "The Grapes of Graff," Michael Cera, who played George Michael, appeared as a college tour guide, while Alia Shawkat, who played Maebe, portrayed a girl who was raped and had her head shaved, and who Veronica helps find her rapist.
VERONICA MARS is the latest in a string of shows to appear in the past ten years to present female heroes. This is no longer as novel as it once was, which is a testimony to how effective these shows have been. Although the early part of the nineties saw Dana Scully on THE X-FILES and Xena on the show of the same name, it wasn't until BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER that girl heroes really began to be accepted in a big way. Compare this to the entire prior history of TV. Prior to Dana Scully, once you tick off Emma Peel (who still stands up as one of the great female heroes of all time) and Wonder Woman and the Six Million Dollar Woman (who do not), you have pretty much exhausted the list. But after BUFFY you get Aeryn Sun on FARSCAPE, Max Guevera on DARK ANGEL, Sydney Bristow on ALIAS, and River Tam on FIREFLY and SERENITY (we actually see in the latter what she would have become on the former). These women all do the things that male heroes can do, and it is irrelevant that it is unrealistic to have women doing super empowered things. We overlook that what male heroes are just as unrealistic. It is simply a convention that we buy Superman and Batman and the Green Hornet and Caine, and merely a bias that women doing similar things were unacceptable. I cracked up reading about a female anti-feminist philosophy professor who expressed outrage that feminists might want Wendy and not Peter Pan fighting Captain Hook, as if a boy who could fly and fight a pirate were somehow more lifelike. After Buffy, Wendy was free to take on Hook.
Then came Veronica. Unlike Buffy, she is not super powered. Unlike Sydney and Aeryn, she wasn't trained from earliest childhood to be a super warrior. Unlike River and Max, she isn't genetically altered. She is just a girl. What is her super power? Her wits. She does what she does simply by being smarter better than anyone else. These female heroes (I am intentionally avoiding using "heroine," which I think usually is employed to indicate less of a hero than a male version) have helped alter popular imagery about what women can and cannot do. Before Buffy and Max and Veronica, maybe popular culture could promulgate myths about a woman's proper place being in the home taking care of her kids, but not now. Or, stealing the title from one of Season Two's best episodes, now "Nobody Puts Baby in a Corner." Veronica is the ultimate 3rd Wave Feminist.
What can you say about Kristen Bell? I honestly feel she deserves an Emmy nomination for Best Actress. She is an immensely gifted individual, and she doesn't even get to employ her singing and dancing skills (her background is in musical theater) on the show. She is a very tiny girl (I've read 5'1 in more than one place), but she is able to project so marvelously that it is almost impossible to believe that she is that small. She projects, "Tough chick." She makes you believe that she can take on an entire motorcycle gang and somehow come out on top. Or the combined forces of a sheriff's department and the FBI. Yes, she is as cute as a button, but it is her toughness and resilience that you love about her character. No matter how many terrible things happen to Veronica, she is like a cork that just pops back to the surface. She is backed by a great supporting cast. You have to love Jason Dohring as Logan Echols, one of the more complex, hard to predict characters on TV. He is also great at delivering the one-liners the writers give him. For instance, in one episode this season Veronica, wearing her restaurant uniform, rushes to get on an elevator, only to find Logan on it (this is at one of the periods where she and Logan are fairly hostile to one another).
Logan: Hi ho.
Veronica (mildly shocked): What?
Logan: Hi ho, its off to work we go.
The show contains reams of great dialogue like that. Another supporting character I want to mention is Enrico Colantoni, who excels as Veronica's father Keith. The two exhibit a rare father-daughter chemistry and comprise one of the great such relationships on TV. One character as hard to read as Logan is Weevil, played by Francisco Capra. Though he plays the ultimate outsider, Capra is the ultimate Hollywood insider, the grandson of studio exec Frank Capra Jr. and the great grandson of Hollywood legend Frank Capra.
The BUFFY connections multiplied this season. Charisma Carpenter joined the show as a frequent guest star, playing Kendall Casablancas, a gold digger who seems a lower-class Cordelia Chase. It is certain that she will be back for Season Three (that is only a mild spoiler). Alyson Hannigan returned as Logan's sister Trina. There was even a moment when Kendall and Trina had an encounter. Hosts of fans were flashing on Willow and Cordy in the Sunnydale library. Finally, Joss Whedon himself did a cameo as an obnoxiously self-important rental car manager. Whedon wasn't the only celebrity to make a cameo. Early in the season director Kevin Smith played a fast food clerk, while the lead singers for both the Dandy Warhols (who perform "We Used to Be Friends") and Spoon sang on karaoke night in the restaurant where Veronica works (with Britt Daniel of Spoon appropriately singing along to Elvis Costello's "Veronica").
On May 18th the CW-the result of a merge of UPN and the WB-will announce their new schedule. Though VM's ratings were terrible, the critical raves and the quality of the show seem certain to make this magnificent show one of the flagship shows on the new network. This truly is TV as good as it gets.
Description of Veronica Mars: The Complete Second Season
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