‘Bred Crumbs

Sorry, I tried again, and I just can’t get interested in Veronica Mars. And I suspect the main thing keeping me from liking Veronica Mars is that I don’t like Veronica Mars.

Before tonight, I’d seen the cult UPN show 1½ times, and come away roundly unimpressed. It reminded me of Smallville, except that nothing nearly interesting or riffable happened, and Chloe was a bitch. But the critics and trusted friends keep raving, so I vowed to try again. And I swear I tried to open my heart to the show. For instance, I didn’t tune in two weeks ago because I knew it was an episode about being on a jury, and those rarely make for tell-your-friends television. And last Wednesday, I was in a rotten mood, so I stayed away again.

Tonight at last, I kept my appointment-TV appointment, and I was immediately reminded of something that put me off the previous times. Narration. I know, every show has it now, but only two should: Scrubs and My Name Is Earl. The point of narration in TV these days seems to be to constantly remind us the show has a "voice." But in most cases, it just points up how thin those voices are.

Which brings us back to Veronica. This episode, she spent a lot of her voiceover time complaining about being "poor," all the while wielding designer jackets, a digital Nikon with a bazooka-sized telephoto, and a Mac. (The ostentatious display of the Mac was followed by two scenes built lovingly around iPod Shuffles. The episode couldn’t have been more of an Apple commercial if all the characters had been silhouetted and decked out as phony hipsters.) We see that she takes private-eye gigs to afford her nice things, which I guess is supposed to make her a can-do kind of gal, but, well, isn’t having work that provides enough money to buy nice things kind of the definition of not poor?

Veronica’s perception of her poorness is apparently derived from her high school, which is filled with insanely rich kids. Veronica’s distaste for the rich kids is so intense that she is constantly dating them. Yet her back arches up when her not-rich friend Wallace falls for an imported jet-set hottie. The new chick’s crime seems to be that she’s not Veronica. Veronica shoulders a massive chip, in a Zesty Ranch Look At Me flavor.

Now, if unlikeable Veronica would just start destroying her unlikeable colleagues, and become intriguingly psychotic, then we’d have a show. (It would be called Profit.)

But that’s not the show we have, and in hopes of finding the existing series’ selling point, I focused on its renowned snappy patter, and there were a few barbs that ought to have been funny. But filtered through the shrillness of Veronica, they tumbled out flat. Deflected again by the titular character, we turn to the supporting players and find … lots of annoying rich kids. And Veronica’s father, who can’t shake the burden of being Enrico Colantoni, and thus constantly reminding me of Just Shoot Me. But that Alicia woman seems nice. Almost nice enough to make me want to tune in again to see what her secret is.

Which leads to the one strength of Veronica Mars that could potentially draw me in: nifty plotting. When you can make an episode about real-estate fraud go somewhere intriguing, you should get some kind of TV writer’s medal. By the end of the episode, a repeat of the third one this season, a massive scam was revealed, its perpetrator’s capture was unwittingly prevented by the conflicting loyalties and rivalries of his son, and Kristen Bell failed to convince us that Veronica was distraught to discover that a recent deadly bus crash was meant to kill her. Huh. Veronica finally gets some attention, and now she doesn’t want it. It’s going to be a long narration next episode.

I probably won’t be there. This viewing did upgrade my opinion of Veronica Mars from Should Be Avoided to Endurable — not quite up to Everybody Hates Chris, I-just-finished-dinner-and-I’m-too-bloated-to-turn-off-the-TV watchable, but maybe to nothing’s-on-and-I-really-want-background-noise-while-I’m-at-the-computer levels.

But, as Veronica and her product-development team would surely agree, iTunes fills that niche just as well. And with iTunes, I can enjoy that great Dandy Warhols song without it being butchered into a title sequence.