‘Veronica Mars’ surprise: Hulu’s revival arrives early

I’ve seen more than one viewing fantasy come true in 25 years of writing about television.

In 2001, I wrote a column about the Second Chance Channel. “Still mysteriously unavailable on any cable or satellite system,” it was “the place to go for all that television you really would have watched or taped if only the dog hadn’t eaten your remote.”

Now, I can barely remember a time when we couldn’t easily catch up on most shows through a video-on-demand or streaming service, on any screen we choose.

I once dreamed, too, of a TV Critics Channel, a place where the 1994-95 classic My So-Called Life wasn’t canceled after just 19 episodes, and where “Roseanne never won the lottery.”

My So-Called Life, whose star, Claire Danes, grew up to play Homeland’s brilliant and unstable Carrie Mathison, never did come back.

But that lottery-free version of Roseanne did return, before its star imploded her big comeback in one racist tweet, leaving behind only ABC’s The Conners. We also got to see how Murphy’s baby, Avery, turned out, in a so-so 11th season of CBS’s Murphy Brown, and to witness the reunion of Will & Grace on NBC.

» READ MORE: Why ‘Roseanne’ had to be canceled

All those revivals have had their moments, but it’s a trend I think television, and TV viewers, would be better off without. Born of broadcast networks’ desperate need to mine a more successful past, it risks muddying our memories of once-great shows.

And yet now, thanks to Hulu, Veronica Mars is back, and I couldn’t be happier. Why? Because unlike those shows, which helped define their eras, this is one whose time may finally have come. In fact, it’s come a bit earlier than expected, Hulu having surprised fans on Friday by releasing the new season that day, rather than on July 26.

It’s been 12 years since Veronica Mars’ UPN/CW run ended and five since a crowdfunded movie reunited Veronica (Kristen Bell, The Good Place) with the friends and foes from her years as a teenage private investigator in a California seaside town called Neptune. On July the streaming service premiered eight new episodes.

And unlike the movie, which was fun but not nearly as strong as the series that spawned it, this new season is about more than giving longtime fans, including the ones who call themselves “Marshmallows,” what they thought they wanted. (Warning: While this piece is spoiler-free, there are already some full-season reviews out there, so if you’d rather be surprised, choose your social media wisely.)

» READ MORE: Backers of ‘Veronica Mars’ movie got what they paid for

It might even create some new fans, Veronica Mars having never been anything close to a ratings sensation in its first three seasons, which Hulu added to its library on July 1. I like a lot about the new season — including the additions of Patton Oswalt as a pizza delivery guy with a true-crime fixation and J.K. Simmons as an ex-con with big ambitions — but the best reason to watch may be to bring you back to the original, and especially to the first season, which remains its best.

I’ve never quite understood the viewers who resist high school shows even as they tolerate adolescent behavior in, say, the surgeons of Grey’s Anatomy. But I know they exist, because I spent years trying to get them to watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Friday Night Lights. Perhaps they’ll feel more comfortable with this older Veronica as she works to get to the bottom of a fatal spring-break bombing in her seaside hometown.

Just don’t think of this as Nancy Drew, all grown up. Veronica was never Nancy Drew. And while in some sad ways she was an adult at 17, in others she’s never quite gotten there.

From the start, the show took on some heavy emotional lifting. Music and a random Paris Hilton sighting aside, its 2004-05 first season feels very much at home in 2019.

Veronica was a rape survivor whose best friend, Lilly Kane (Amanda Seyfried), had been murdered. The case had cost her father, Keith (Enrico Colantoni), both his marriage and his job as sheriff, and had left Duncan (Teddy Dunn), Lilly’s brother — and Veronica’s ex-boyfriend — a mess. And yet the snappy dialogue seldom flagged as Veronica Mars told stories about the people at every level of Neptune’s stratified society, from the movie star’s son, Logan Echolls (Jason Dohring), to the motorcycle gang leader Eli “Weevil” Navarro (Francis Capra).

That the girl who once said, “You want to know how I lost my virginity? So do I," is now a woman whose lack of trust — in people and institutions — is baked in can only make more sense when you see where she came from.

Not that everyone in Neptune is doomed to remain the person they were in high school. Veronica wasn’t an unreliable narrator when she said, of Logan, long ago, that “every school has an obligatory psychotic jackass. He’s ours,” but she didn’t then have the full story. Damage takes many forms, and the unpeeling of Logan Echolls’ psyche has always been one of the show’s most compelling story lines.

The Logan reintroduced in the 2014 movie — a naval intelligence officer who needed Veronica’s sleuthing skills — is now again her boyfriend. More important, he’s a man who’s been working hard on himself (and not just on the prodigious six-pack he sports in his entrance). What happens when one person in a relationship is trying to change and the other resists? We’ll see.

While it’s good to discover that Wallace Fennel (Percy Daggs III), Veronica’s extraordinarily sane best friend from high school, is still extraordinarily sane, it’s not so much fun to see how life’s treated Weevil, another of Veronica’s damaged former classmates.

Her father, still struggling with his health years after a car accident, has a story line that contrasts rich people’s medical care with everyone else’s, adding a new and relatable aspect to the show’s exploration of economic inequality, and reminding us how much time really has passed, even if Bell still looks deceptively young.

Does the new Veronica Mars make a case for further adventures in Neptune? I’m not sure.

But it does make one for going back to the beginning and getting to know, or reacquaint ourselves with, a character who always deserved more attention than she got.

Veronica Mars. Hulu.