there's a really nice article focusing on kristen bell in today's
new york times. one paragraph has a couple of mild spoilers about tonight's ep, so i'm cutting that one and posting it over on the spoilers board. if you want to read it, check there.
VM is also the most prominent "highlight" of tonight's TV shows in the sidebar of the paper's TV grid.
As a Stern Teenager, She's Not Such a StretchBy NED MARTEL
September 28, 2005
SAN DIEGO - A high school can be like a battlefield, with weapons checked by metal detectors, and no place suggests this more than the set of "Veronica Mars." A few minutes west of downtown, jets from Miramar Air Force Base streak overhead, and the landlord who rents a soundstage to "Mars," a scrappy UPN drama now in its second year, leases out the adjacent property for military maneuvers on arid terrain. Blank rounds pop in the distance.
Kristen Bell, a 25-year-old Detroit native who plays the title role, is also spitting out rapid-fire bits of dialogue. Once a professed "pigtailed girl next door," she is now Veronica, a combustible teenager in an era when the schoolyard stakes are much higher than Ms. Bell ever knew.
When she was a high school student at the Shrine of the Little Flower, Ms. Bell recalled, nuns insisted that girls keep their uniform skirts just above the knee. In Neptune, Veronica's fictional hometown, however, a student-parent dalliance, a date rape and a murder dominate the machine-gun-quick conversation. And everyone fights against the labels they have been given but cannot shake.
As watchable as the series has proved to be, the show is running from the label of "unwatched"; the ratings have been low. Thus the pressure is on Ms. Bell to perfect her portrayal of a 17-year-old sleuth who constantly asserts herself as a sassy but stern voice of authority.
Rob Thomas, the creator of "Veronica Mars," said that when he was a high school teacher in Austin, Tex., "I would watch what purported to be teen shows, and clearly everyone on the show was in their early 20's. I always thought, if I ever were to do one, I'd get real teenagers."
In the annals of television, Claire Danes once played a character a few years older than her actual early-teenage self on "My So-Called Life," and the stars of "Freaks and Geeks" portrayed characters close to their idling cusp-of-adult years. But employing minors has cumbersome rules, and so Mr. Thomas rethought his onetime pet peeve.
In keeping with hits like "Beverly Hills, 90210" and "The O.C.," Mr. Thomas hired only adults to do the teenage talking, and was delighted when he found his female lead: "I think I might have taken Kristin Bell at 30 to play this role."
"We let Veronica say things that, if you get all day to think about it, would be the perfect retort," he said.
The show's numbers often rank it in 100th place or thereabouts, even as its writing and acting draw steady praise.
In each episode, Veronica lightens the load of her aggrieved father, Keith (Enrico Colantoni), and his detective agency, while she wards off the assaults that come with unpopularity. The scripts also examine delicate relations between the rich and the poor within Neptune, and Veronica's family misfortunes have placed her suddenly in the latter.
Like her character, Ms. Bell had a dad with an investigative bent. Her father has worked as a television news director in several cities, including St. Louis and Detroit, and his work made her and her two older sisters aware of the calamities in the larger world.
"You see a car accident, I'd call my dad and say, 'It's on I-75, it's here and here, it's a two-car collision,' " she recalled, aware even then of ratings and competition in the TV business. "We had to, because if my dad got it first, it was always better."
And just as Veronica has struggled with the loss of her closest confidante, Lilly Kane, Ms. Bell experienced a personal tragedy when her best friend in high school died in a car crash. "It's made me grateful to be here and who I am," she explained. "I don't look at it as being that intense, but it really was the best and worst moment of my life."
Ms. Bell's own nature - by turns, vulnerable and unflappable - has clearly worked its way into Mr. Thomas's storylines, just as it has helped to excite teenagers in the cast's frequent shopping-mall visits around the country.
It has also inspired devotion from many older viewers; UPN found that 53 percent of last season's audience was between the ages of 18 and 49. CBS, which, like UPN, is owned by Viacom, tried to bring new viewers by broadcasting a few "Veronica" reruns this summer.
[this paragraph with mild spoilers for premiere has been cut - see Spoilers board for it]
To Ms. Bell, the reasons for the wide range of ages among the show's viewers can be boiled down to long-harbored hurt, felt at an age when personality is just being formed. "Every single person can relate to being an outcast," she said.
In her high school experience, Ms. Bell said she had a wide range of friends, but still felt the sting of being a "goody-goody." A veteran of the New York stage ("Reefer Madness" and "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer"), she still calls herself "a corny musical theater geek at heart."
"I will jam to 'Jesus Christ Superstar' in my car with nobody else around," she added.
Just before "Veronica Mars" began shooting last year, Ms. Bell proved how tough she could be when playing a duplicitous, and eventually murdered, prostitute in the first season of the HBO series "Deadwood."
She recalled her amazement at what that show's creator, David Milch, knew she was capable of when put in the midst of bullies and bullets. "Maybe he saw my soul," she said, with a raised eyebrow.
www.nytimes.com/2005/09/28/arts/television/28mars.html