“We used to be friends a long time ago/But I haven’t thought of you lately at all . . . “

I recently returned from a week in Los Angeles, and boy, did the City of Angels treat me well! Sondheim at the Hollywood Bowl! Edward James Olmos at the Aero Theatre! I breakfasted with friends from high school and college, lunched with my favorite podcaster, and dined with a bunch of former students who I’m proud to see are taking L.A. by storm!

One such success story is Taylor Mallory. Back when she was 14 and I was – not 14, we would passionately discuss our favorite books and films, in between putting on some fabulous shows. (It will particularly interest fans of this blog to know that, in addition to playing Anita in West Side Story and Tracy Lord in The Philadelphia Story, Taylor starred as Miss Blacklock in A Murder Is Announced. If you click here, you can watch a teaser we made to publicize the show. Taylor, of course, is the one wearing pearls!)

Our biggest arguments were over what we liked to read. Taylor was as big a fan of modern fantasy novels as I was. After we bonded over our love for Philip Pullman, she tried to convince me to read The Mortal Instruments series by Cassandra Clare. I got through one and gave up. I even had the nerve to criticize the author, which irritated Taylor no end. Of course, Taylor got the last laugh: she grew up to become a screenwriter and got hired on the writing staff for the series Shadowhunters: The Mortal Instruments, based on Clare’s novels. It ran for three seasons.

Taylor has been working steadily since then. But now – she’s not. This cannot be news to any of you, but the WGA, the screenwriters’ union, is on strike! Negotiations have broken down between them and the studios over a complex set of issues over their share of compensation for the billions of dollars they make for the industry, job security, and other things. (Here’s an article that might help you sort out some of these issues – they’re important. And if you’re so inclined, here is a place you can go to learn how you can provide much-needed support to the writers while they are not working.)

I was thrilled to offer my support by meeting up with Taylor one morning at the front gates of Fox Studios and walking the picket line with her. We talked about many things, some of them related to her job (or current lack of one) and others involving the banter of old friends who both love to talk. One thing is clear: a lot of just plain folks are about to become much more aware of the strike (which recently surpassed 100 days) than have been before. The fall TV season is going to be heavy on reality series, recycled game shows, new episodes of Dateline and reruns. What will be missing is new scripted material. And that lack of new productions will also play out in movie theatres where even the products that were finished months ago might very well be delayed because the actors starring in these movies cannot help promote them on evening talk shows. (Yes, the actors are on strike, too – for issues that sometimes overlap with those of the writers.) 

If you already find yourself missing a favorite network series, it might behoove you to look up the plethora of shows that are currently streaming on Netflix and Prime and Hulu and Apple+ and Max and Disney+ and Paramount+ and Peacock and Freeform and Tubi and YouTube and on and on. But most of these services cost money, and none of them make it easy for us to locate shows to watch. I’d like to help everyone out on that score. Of course, I write about mysteries, so that’s what I’m going to stick to here.  

I already talked about Poker Face on Peacock, but pretty much every streaming service has at least one mystery series to watch. Paramount+ is a great place to catch up on classic Perry Mason. The third season of Only Murders in the Building has just started streaming on Hulu. (I loved the first season but found the second disappointing. This time around looks terrific, however: in addition to guest-starring the likes of Meryl Streep and Paul Rudd, it’s set in the world of Broadway musical theatre and features songs by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, the guys behind Dear Evan Hansen and LaLa Land.)

Netflix is great for international series, especially Spanish-language shows and Scandi-noir thrillers. My neighbor just recommended an Icelandic series called Trapped. The premise for the first season sounds promising: due to weather conditions, the residents of a small Icelandic town are trapped on a fjord with the passengers of a ferry bound from Denmark. Then a dismembered body shows up and it seems there’s a murderer in their midst. Fun times! I’m definitely going to check it out. Meanwhile, on Apple+, I just binged all seven episodes of Hijack, a British mini-series starring a terrific large cast headed by Idris Elba. It’s more a thriller than a mystery, although every episode is loaded with enough twists to make any Carr or Christie fan happy. I give it a most enthusiastic recommendation!

But as I said, until this strike ends, the new shows are going to peter out, and we’re all going to have to look for options from the extensive archives all these streaming services provide. And you’re going to have to look soon, for it seems the studios intend to pull a lot of fairly recent series from rotation so that they don’t have to pay residuals to the actors and writers who created them. I thought I might offer an occasional recommendation of a classic series worth checking out if you are a mystery fan. And my first choice was brought up by the fabulous Taylor in one of our conversations. 

I’m not averse to shows about teenagers, even though I spent thirty-one years with them as a teacher. Believe me when I say the lives of real-life teens are just as dramatic as their TV counterparts, even if they’re lived with a little less flair. Still, if I’m going to watch these dramas, I prefer my teens served with a genre twist. You can keep your Dawson’s Creek and your 90210; give me a group of kids who hunt vampires or solve mysteries. Now that Joss Whedon has joined the pantheon of Hollywood creeps, I’d prefer to not talk about him, except to say that if you haven’t watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer, take a deep breath, separate the art from the artist, and stream it on Hulu. It’s a terrific show. The sixth season becomes truly dark, and the final seventh season is the weakest, but it’s all worth the ride.

In 2004, one year after Buffy put the stakes away for good, the UPN network (where Buffy had ended after getting its start on the WB) premiered a new series produced and written by writer Rob Thomas called Veronica Mars. I was familiar with Thomas through a couple of intriguing YA novels, Rats Saw God and Slave Day, and I loved the premise of the series, set in the fictional Southern California beach town of Neptune and centering on a young woman who works for her private eye father and solves mysteries. If Buffy was a teenaged soap opera set on the actual Hellmouth, Veronica Mars had the noir vibe of a Raymond Chandler novel, complete with a young private detective who sardonically voiceovers us through the series:

“This is my school. If you go here, your parents are millionaires, or your parents work for millionaires. Neptune, California: a town without a middle class.”

Veronica has never been a millionaire, but her dad, Keith Mars, used to be the sheriff of Neptune, and as the daughter of the town’s lawman, Veronica had enjoyed special status not usually afforded to the children of working stiffs. She mingled with the wealthy kids and was particularly close to the children of software mogul Jake Kane: son Duncan was Veronica’s boyfriend, and daughter Lilly was her best friend. And everything was hunky-dory – until a year before the series begins, when Lilly Kane was found bludgeoned to death beside the family swimming pool, and Keith Mars accused her father Jake of being the killer. That’s when the town turned against Keith, recused him as sheriff and made Veronica the ultimate outsider. 

When the show begins, Veronica’s life is wrecked: she has no mother, she has no friends, she and her dad live in a motel and are anathema in the town. Even as she builds a reputation as a P.I. in her own right with her fellow students, she remains isolated from most of them. Her status reaches a horrifying low at a summer party where she is drugged and raped, and then it gets even worse as her investigation into Lilly’s death calls everything she is sure of – even her own parentage – into question.

This is exactly where you want a noir hero to be: Veronica starts out having lost nearly everything: her best friend, her boyfriend, even her mother, who deserted the family after Keith got ousted and left town. Now, Veronica is a junior and a loner. Her dad has hung up his shingle as a private investigator, and Veronica works for him, both as a receptionist and a junior detective. She witnesses the depravity and darkness of the shallow, narrow-minded wealthy class that has rejected her and in the poorer citizens of Neptune who have to scramble in often nefarious ways for their tiny share of the pie. 

Thomas has structured the various strands of Veronica’s life with the messy complexity of a noir. Perpetually haunted by flashbacks of past events both happy and horrifying, she escapes the loneliness of school life by assisting her father in his cases, which means that while other kids are in their rooms doing their homework, Veronica is set up in a car outside a seedy motel, armed with her camera and trusty pit bull, Backup. But Veronica also has cases of her own that arise from the hijinks that kids with unlimited resources often find themselves getting into. It is in this case-of-the-week business where the show can be something of a mixed bag. Sure, noir teaches us not to trust anybody, but some of the twists have a certain sameness to them. And some of the better twists, like in Episodes 3, “Meet John Smith,” and 7, “The Girl Next Door,” have become old hat. (The series is nearly two decades old, after all.) Still, her casework is how Veronica slowly rebuilds her old relationships and fosters new ones, even though all too often she uses her friends to get information.

The biggest strengths of the show lie in the season long Big Case and in Veronica herself. In Season One, that case is the murder of Lilly Kane. On the day she died, she told Veronica that she had “a big secret – and it’s a good one!” And now Veronica burns with a desire for vengeance – for the loss of her friend and her father’s good name. She also wants to show up the police and the community who have doubted and dismissed the Mars family. This sometimes puts her at odds with her own father, and as deeper, darker secrets emerge, it threatens to upend Veronica’s life even further.

And while the smaller cases Veronica solves may be flatter, more amusing or “heartwarming” than the larger issues, sometimes they feed well into the Big Case, providing our heroine with information she needs to get closer to the Big Truth. Plus, the relationships Veronica develops with her “clients,” her few friends and her many enemies not only make her someone you root for, they also build suspense as you start to wonder about each of the people in Veronica’s circle.  

As Season One progresses, Veronica brings a few other supporters to her side and enlists them to help her in her work. These include Wallace Fennell (Percy Daggs III), a sweet-natured jock whom Veronica saves from utter humiliation on his first day at school; Mac (Tina Majorino), a computer expert who provides information and technological wizardry to Veronica; and Eli “Weevil” Navarro (Francis Capra), a gang leader whose spicy repartee with Veronica masks a true friendship. As this is a teenage series, you might expect that Veronica helps her friends with their problems, and you would be right. The “cases” involving her friends are sometimes the show’s weakest: Veronica discovers the truth about Mac’s parentage, and it’s pretty unbelievable. She rids Wallace’s mother of a slimy tenant. And the fact that Weevil is suspected of just about every criminal activity that occurs in town may be a realistic testament to the racism of the upper-class community, but Veronica’s constant rescuing of the guy becomes ludicrous and emasculating. (Although Weevil doesn’t seem to mind.) 

There’s also the mystery of who Veronica will end up with romantically, which again reminds us that this is a show for teenaged sensibilities. Will Veronica reconnect with ex-boyfriend Duncan Kane (Teddy Dunn)? Or will she find happiness with rich guy Troy Vandegraff (Aaron Ashmore)? And what about her growing feelings for bad boy Logan Echolls (Jason Dohring)? Will they interfere with her burgeoning relationship with nice cop Leo D’Amato (Max Greenfield)? And how does the fact that most of these guys are hiding terrible secrets play into Veronica’s love life???

The most central relationship, and the one that really elevates this series, is between father and daughter, and that is in no small part due to the chemistry between the actors who play them. Nobody does that combination of sweet, tart and smart quite like Kristen Bell. Frankly, you could fashion any kind of show around her, and I’d watch it. (The Good Place is on Netflix, folks, and it’s amazing!). And Enrico Colantoni is the perfect imperfect dad as Keith, trying to provide both the stability and the space for Veronica that she needs after her whole world has exploded. The scenes that take place in Keith’s shabby office or their seedy apartment burst with warmth and love, compared to the cold, loveless atmosphere of the palatial estates occupied by wealthy families like the Kanes and the Echolls.

Good noir takes decent folks down some dark roads and rarely lets them escape intact. The Lilly Kane murder threatens the very stability of Veronica’s own family. When the smoke (literally) clears at the end of Season One, she has solved the case and resolved those family issues. But she has also upended her life once again, lost someone she dearly loves, and faces a whole slew of new problems. That’s exactly what you want a good TV show to do to its characters every year.

For the second season, Thomas combined two big cases to create a season-long arc: the tragic plummet of a school bus off a cliff, and the murder of one of Weevil’s gang members, for which Logan Echolls is arrested and charged. The writer himself admitted that he might have gone overboard with the complexities of this season, both for the Big Case and for Veronica’s tumultuous love life. For Season Three, the series moved from the UPN to the new CW. Veronica and her friends all moved to college, and instead of a single season-long arc, Thomas divided the cases into multi-episode segments that fed into each other. This probably worked a bit better, but itwasn’t enough to save the series, which got cancelled in 2007. 

A few years later, Thomas tried to make a movie to tie all the loose ends of the show together for fans, but the studio was having none of it. Then, in 2013, Kristen Bell joined Thomas to launch a drive on Kickstarter to get the $2 million needed to make the film. That goal was reached within eleven hours, with the fund ultimately netting Thomas over $5.7. In the 2014 film that resulted, Veronica is a lawyer living in New York City with one boyfriend, but by the end of the movie she is with a different guy (whom she has cleared of a murder charge) and has returned to Neptune to aid her father in his crusade to eliminate police corruption. All this led to an 8-episode series on Hulu in 2019. It’s . . . not great, but at least we get to catch up with Veronica and her father (wisely the central relationship in the season), see how messed up her relationships with the guys in her life are, and watch her solve a rather hurried but no less horrifying case involving a serial bomber who is plaguing Neptune. 

And so, mystery fans, I highly recommend Veronica Mars. The first season is the best, but Bell and Colantoni’s performances carry you through the rest of the series. I’m not here to claim that, as a mystery, it plays fair. But it’s a good mystery all the same. Some of the acting among the teen cast is admittedly uneven, but there are plenty of characters to love/hate, especially Jason Dohring as bad boy Logan Echolls, Kyle Secor, Harry Hamlin, Alyson Hannigan (fresh off Buffy), Charisma Carpenter (fresh off Angel) and – in a breakout role that Thomas expanded after seeing how perfect she was – Amanda Seyfried as Lilly Kane. It’s also fun to see future stars show up in smaller roles, like Adam Scott as a maligned teacher, Jessica Chastain as a victim, and Paris Hilton as a wealthy skank. 

If you have thoughts on Veronica Mars or other TV recommendations for me, please leave them in the comments below.