Veronica Mars TV Party at Red Stag Supper Club!

So The Blogulator is finally showing its face in public. Qualler, Brigitte, Jerksica, and I will all be at the Red Stag Supper Club this upcoming Monday, June 13th, for our first co-sponsored TV Party with our buds over at Girl Germs. They've been doing TV Party for a while (which specializes in screening favorite eps of shows featuring empowered female characters), but now they've kindly asked us to join them, as we're both doing netcasts for the Fancy Pants Gangsters network, and we both love us some good TV. Our first foray into co-presenting this event is one of my favoritest shows of all time, Veronica Mars! Here's the lowdown why you need to come and/or start watching it already:

Crime shows and teen dramas have been among the most successful, albeit trite, sorts of primetime network television, so it must have been a real bummer to studio execs when along came Veronica Mars, a show that could technically be lumped into either category but boldly defied the conventions of both at every turn throughout its sadly brief three season run. Starring now-movie star Kristen Bell as the titular adolescent detective, "V-Mars" (as the cool kids call it) led viewers through addictive and twisty mysteries that eschewed the rote case-of-the-week procedural style of storytelling that has plagued television for far too long in favor of richer and more sprawling season-long arcs every year. In addition, the crime-solving side of the show took a modern noir-y perspective of the idyllic-yet-corrupt (not to mention fictional) community of Neptune, California, trading in smoky alleyways for sunset-tinted high school hallways and replacing ham-fisted machismo-soaked dialogue with aggressively witty (and often feminist) commentary.

The inaugural season, which debuted on UPN in 2004, is arguably the best of the small bunch, possibly only because of its grandiose and slow-burning introduction of a wide range of instantly memorable characters. There's Enrico Colantoni as Veronica's deflated yet supportive ex-sheriff father (it is in this TV geek's humble opinion that feminist male characters are just as important as empowered female ones) who triumphs as both a humble town saint as well as a complexly uncertain but constantly loving parent. And then there's Jason Dohring as the brooding rich boy next door Logan, whose girlfriend Lily's murder is Veronica's main source of investigation throughout the show's first run of episodes. Lily (played by Big Love's Amanda Seyfreid) is equally arresting and vital as Veronica, too, in powerful flashback scenes that never feel extraneous to the present day goings-on. Lastly, you cannot leave out Eli "Weevil" Navarro, portrayed by Francis Capra, Jr., whose presence exemplifies the tricky class conflicts of Neptune, and uses Veronica as an admirably capable middle class middlewoman between the so-called "thugs" and bureaucrats of the town.

Seasons two and three continue much of the awesome that the first contains, bringing Veronica and the gang (her best friends Mac the wry tech-geek and Wallace the timid basketballer) through to graduation and into college. It sounds like a typical place for the series to go, but it manages to use it merely as a backdrop for first, an intense (and unpredictably personal) look into a bus crash that killed several of Veronica's classmates, and second, an on-campus serial rapist at Hearst College. And here, in the show's third season, which sadly leaves behind or at the sidelines too many of the show's best characters from earlier not to mention came to a crashing cancellation that kept it from a proper close, it all comes back to the first season: Veronica, being a former rape victim, is not forced so much as chooses to constantly battle against seedy male figures that take advantage of and brutally assault the good and the strong throughout the series' run. Yet this fact never defines her, and she never lets anyone define her this way, nor let it lead to other distracting and unfair labels, because with or without mention of the event that may or may not have influenced her to become a professional investigator, she's a badass, she's smarter than you, and simply put, she's one the best female characters ever put to the small screen. And dammit, that fourth season with her interning at the FBI should have happened.


Join the ladies of Girl Germs, as well as us, the TV-obsessed Blogulator Radio crew, Monday, June 13 at 9 p.m. We'll spin some Germsy music until 9:30, when the Veronica Mars goodness commences.

Vote for your favorite episodes here, or email suggestions to girlgermsradio[at]gmail[dot]com.

Happy hour specials from 10 to close: $3 domestics, $4 select taps, $4 select cocktails, $4 Crispin, $3 house wine. (The event is ALL AGES.)

TV Party with Girl Germs is sponsored by Fancy Pants Gangsters and The Blogulator.

For more information about Girl Germs or Blogulator Radio, or to listen to the podcasts, visit girlgermsradio.wordpress.com or fancypantsgangsters.com.

This entry was posted by chris, on Monday, June 06, 2011. You can leave your response.