The Review:
For reasons I won’t go into, Rob Thomas cannot be accused of fan service in Veronica Mars Season Four. The eight-episode season is chock full of what made the series so beloved* while ably transporting the formerly-teen characters into full-on adults with complicated lives.** Patton Oswalt and J.K. Simmons (as a pizza delivery man, and ex-con toady to Big Dick Casablancas, respectively) are excellent additions.***
The verdict: Recommended
Cost: $11.99/month via Hulu
Where watched: at home with Matt
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Further sentences:
*Wise-cracking, dark humor, solid dad/daughter relationship, a romance that is complicated, mysteries to solve, bad choices to make, good choices to make, and the wealthy/shady beachfront town of Neptune, California.
**The multitudes of trauma the characters have experienced is being dealt with in ways both healthy and unhealthy. It’s also gently lampooned in two amusing scenes: one with a bunch of true-crime enthusiasts, another with a high school student recapping previous seasons’ plot lines by asking Veronica, “did you know that…?”
***Two questions annoyed me from the first episode. 1) Why does Neptune have a police department when that was an entire subplot of season two? 2)What in the name of all that is holy has become of Logan’s vast fortune? Both of these questions could have been answered with single sentence asides (Ever since incorporation passed in 2015 the police department has taken over in the incompetent realm. And. After the lawsuit with Trina, there wasn’t much left.) Shoddy story crafting there.
Favorite IMDB trivia item:
In Season 4, the professional NBA player, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, is a writer (S4, E6). He’s also the highest-scoring NBA player by total career regular season points scored (38,387).
(Stay focused on the show, IMDB trivia writer. He’s also a producer.)
