A teenage private eye investigates her classmates' murder.

1/4 (Bad).

I lost all interest in this show pretty early in this season, but thought I'd see it through, give it one more chance. Now I'm more than halfway done with the series, so I feel like I've come too far to give up on it. Sigh. ( )

This, along with the first season DVDs, was the gift of a friend who hoped I'd love it as much as she did--and I did. I think it's one of the best television series I've ever seen. As the back cover puts it: "Veronica is an outcast in a trendy SoCal beach town. Once she ran with Neptune High's in crowd. But she's on the outside after her best friend is murdered and her sheriff father accuses the wrong man as the perp: the dead girl's millionaire father." That's not the only complication. All the characters on this series have secrets and sides to them not obvious at first.

The show reminds me of Buffy in its mix of darkly funny and moving. Only instead of being part of a paranormal genre, this is more Nancy Drew as hard-boiled detective as Veronica solves small mysteries while digging into some big ones. Again, like Buffy this has both strong self-contained episodes but they build into an arc with a resolution. And you can even add some social satire/commentary into the mix about the haves and the have nots. The first season was as good as television gets. The second season is good, but not as good. A lot of the individual episodes were still great, but I thought the resolution WTF. My friend didn't get me the third season, because she felt it sucked--but given there's a Veronica Mars film in the works I guess I'll have to look it up on Netflix--because I'm definitely seeing it. ( )