Danny ChaiVeronica Mars may be my favorite drama on television nowadays. Sadly, no one watches it and consequently, no one will read this entry. Alias ended with a demoralizing whimper, 24 is good but just a bit too ridiculous and contrived, Lost is… well… lost, last couple seasons of Sopranos have been boring. So yeah, my favorite drama.
It’s not a perfect show. Outside of Veronica and her dad, the acting isn’t that great. And the second season wasn’t as good as the first, which I thought had a lot of insight into high school life and life in general. But it’s a great show.
There are 3 things I especially like about it.
One, there’s a variation in the tone. Meaning, it switches from comedic to dramatic to violent to mundane. Some people might be turned off by it, find it distracting or inconsistent. But I dunno, I jive with it. It’s very Korean/HK movie-esque, and I find that interesting. Plus, that’s more true to life.
Two, the stories are tight. Every story detail ends up being significant in the end. As opposed to say, Lost, where they constantly throw out random connections but they don’t meaningfully come together. Or The West Wing (we’ve watched the first 6 seasons over the course of this calendar year. Exhausting), which has great but kind of sloppy writing. Meaning, they constantly set up and then just drop storylines. Like one season ends with Sam being photographed with a call girl. What happens to that setup? Nothing. They just make an oblique reference to it later. And that happens frequently on The West Wing, stories are set up then dropped. With Veronica Mars, everything is really tight. I like that.
SN. What was up with the Alias guy’s subplot with his dead wife’s murderer? Totally random, added nothing to the story, and distracted from the main plot. Seriously, every aspect of how the show ended depressed me. But anyway.
Three, I like the little commentaries Veronica Mars has on life. One interesting subplot of season two was the proposed incorporation of Neptune, which would essentially separate the haves from the have-nots. They have an interesting discussion where they talk about another place where that happened: Palo Alto. According to the show, after the incorporation of Palo Alto, property values in the incorporated city skyrocketed, while the unincorporated part became one of the worst crime areas in the country. The show’s pretty strong against the incorporation idea, so it’s somewhat a condemnation of Palo Alto. I actually have no idea if the incorporation story is true, but it’s interesting nonetheless.
What other shows have social commentary like this, as brief as it is? None I can think of. Good stuff.
I also like high school shows because I can’t relate to it at all and I feel like I learn something. As you may or may not know, I went to an all-male high school. The only girls I really knew were from church, and they were nice and all but had little to no appeal to me, so that whole high school raging hormones pining after people thing, I pretty much completely skipped. That’s a pretty significant life experience to not have, you know? So yeah, I find that interesting.
On a related subject, I wrote before how I thought Jack Bauer was amoral, guided solely by utilitarianism. I’m taking that back now. I have no clue what his morality is; whatever it is, it’s completely inconsistent. At times he’s completely willing to sacrifice one or a few lives to save many others. “Millions of people will die” he says. Then at other times, he’s not willing to sacrifice a few people when it could save many more people, like in the mall. Then at the extreme, he’ll risk millions of lives to save a single family member or friend. You can’t reconcile it at all. Completely inconsistent.
Oringbay.