Earn This

Rating: 3 1/2 stars (out of 4)

Though it’s easily the weakest season (or “book”) of the show’s three, the excellent first season of the Avatar: The Last Airbender is firmly in the category of superior children-oriented entertainment that’s deep and exciting enough to be appealing to all viewers.

The show’s opening sequence explains that the world of Avatar — an alternate version of Earth — was for centuries in balance between four nations. Each nation is named after one of the four elements: earth, air, fire, and water. A small percentage of people born to each nation are blessed with the ability to “bend”– spiritually manipulate through a hybrid of martial arts and magic — their element.

A hero known as the Avatar is the one person in the world who has the potential to bend all elements, and also enter something called the “Avatar state” which is a heightened power combining all four elements. It’s the Avatar’s role in the world to maintain balance and peace of the four nations. When one Avatar dies, he or she is reincarnated.

Avatar: The Last Airbender begins its story a hundred years after the Avatar has vanished. The Fire Nation has taken over, hunting the Air Nomads to extinction and the Water Tribe to near-extinction. A brother and sister of the Water Tribe, Sokka and Katara, discover a member of the Air Nomads frozen in an iceberg.

We quickly learn that this Airbender, Aang (rhymes with “bang”), is in fact the Avatar, and the time has come for him to fulfill his duties and restore peace and balance to the planet.

Meanwhile, a banished prince of the Fire Nation, Zuko, has been tasked with capturing the Avatar to restore his honor. When Aang reappears, Zuko quickly begins tailing him.

I’ll end my explanation of the premise there, because Avatar is rare in how quickly its plot progresses and expands. Suffice to say that The Last Airbender is a globe-spanning epic, and it shows in these twenty episodes.

Like any great television story, regardless of genre or intended demographic, Avatar thrives because its characters are both well-defined and dynamic. The characters start out as basic types: We’re first shown Aang as the naive one, Katara as the optimistic one, Sokka as the comic relief, Zuko as the obsessed villain, and Iroh as the goofy wise-man. But these types serve as springboards for more complex creations. Every major character is given depth and ambiguity that is gradually revealed.

Few kids’ shows dare to have a serial story. But Avatar is one long arc with several multi-episode stories and a very strong continuity that makes it tough to watch episodes out of order. This provides for a more satisfying storytelling than the usual one-and-done format for animated stories.

I wish the creators had taken it even further, though. “Water,” the official name of the first season, has a large set of one-offs during the beginning and middle of season that don’t move the story forward. But even these one-offs enrich Avatar‘s world. Episodes like “Jet” and “The Kyoshi Warriors” really depict destruction and suffering caused by the invasion. (Plus, almost every episode gets some sort of reprise in the later seasons, making every episode essential.)

Focusing a bit more on the serial plot and less on one-offs would have given the writers a chance to solve one of the problem the season faces in its final episodes: some serious pacing hiccups. The changes the characters go through in the Northern Water Tribe are seriously rushed. Sokka’s relationship with Yue and Katara’s training in waterbending take place entirely over just a couple of episodes when they’re really major developments worthy of longer arcs.

The finale also suffers from a few plot twists that abandon the emotionally grounded reality of the show for a conclusion that’s awe-inspiring but not moving in the same way the next two season finales are.

Each one of the main characters has their moments to shine. Aang’s gradual maturity is convincing, but especially believable following his heartbreak at discovering the fate of his people in “The Southern Air Temple” and guilt after inadvertently hurting Katara in “The Deserter.”  It’s hard to imagine that the snot-covered Sokka of the pilot could ever be a convincing character of pathos, but his fury at Aang in “Bato of the Water Tribe” is earned, as is Katara’s seduction then reversal in “Jet” and response to finding “The Waterbending Scroll.”

But the show-stealer, beginning with “The Storm” about halfway through the season, is Zuko. Though he’s obsessed — and whiny at first — the show slowly chips away at his shell to reveal a startling portrait of shame and pain. His journey is at the heart of the show, perhaps even moreso than the title character’s. The show brilliantly parallels Aang and Zuko in numerous episodes, and most of these are among the season’s best — particularly “The Storm,” perhaps the entire season’s highlight.

Zuko has too many great moments to mention them all, but his big revelation in “The Blue Spirit” and moments of vulnerability and doubt towards the season’s conclusion are particularly unforgettable.

Along with characters that work on an emotional level and a plot that works on a intellectual level, The Last Airbender‘s first season also works in a visual and visceral level. The design of the show is stunning, heavily influenced by anime and other Eastern art. You can see some of this in the plotting and the comic timing, but it’s especially apparent with the looks of the characters and settings.

It’s not a cheap knockoff, though. Rather than making a watered-down Naruto and Dragon Ball Z, the makers of Avatar instead use it as inspiration. They borrow a Japanese visual style, fuse it with some other Asian influences (detectably, some Indian and Chinese motifs), and presents in a distinctly American manner. Rather than diluted, the show’s diversity takes the strengths of many of its inspirations, and presents it with a level of care and detail unheard of in a weekday afternoon programming.

The best comparison I can come up with is Batman: The Animated Series. This gem from the mid ’90s had a wide variety of stylistic influences, but had a style all its own. Both shows have a maturity and darkness to them, though both still clearly fall under the umbrella of kid-oriented television.

Both shows are fun to look at, but have something beneath the surface. Batman paired, visually and thematically, noir-fused shots and a palpable menace. Avatar instead pairs a natural, earthy look with a moral urgency in a decaying world.

The most striking visual element of Avatar are its stunning “bending” action sequences, which are a breath of fresh air from typical fisticuffs and gadgetry of American adventure shows. The creator’s wring every conceivable situation from these supernatural abilities. Instead of having the characters stationary, calling forth magic or spells, the action is more kinetic and physical. These sequences alone make the show worth watching.

Another strength, equally important to Avatar’s success as the characterization and action, is the show’s allegiance to traditional storytelling. Every episode – or at least, every excellent episode – has stakes and consequences on its own. Yet, everything feels like it’s a part of a greater whole. Watching these episodes in sequence, they successfully feel like a first act to a large narrative.

Perhaps the biggest annoyance of the season and series as a whole is simply its nature as a kid-oriented show. Because it’s aimed at less experienced viewers, the lessons and themes of the show are rarely left implied. Pretty much everything is spelled out, which can come across as a bit cheesy, even contrived, at times. It doesn’t significantly diminish the quality of the show, but it could be off-putting at first to people weaned on mature, prime-time TV.

There’s also a childishness to the show’s silly humor that I find endearing but might grate others. The show improved on this in the other seasons as they realized they had a wider audience than they initially anticipated. Again, it’s a quirk of the show that the childish-at-heart will probably enjoy.

Overall, the first season of Avatar ranks among the best American-made animation of the past decade, even if it fails to reach the phenomenal heights of the next two seasons. It overcomes a few pacing issues towards the end of the season and a few throwaway episodes to be must-watch for anyone with a taste for animation, fantasy adventures, and kung-fu. Even those who don’t fall in that category will find plenty to love in Avatar: The Last Airbender, Book 1: Water.

I have a little sister who’s about to graduate from pre-school, so my mom has seen the whole spectrum of kiddie TV shows. When I asked her to describe Yo Gabba Gabba in one sentence, this is what she said:

“It’s what I imagine LSD flashbacks must be like.”

The surreal Nickelodeon show is about dancing and singing and grooving. The average episode features a bunch of songs with gratingly simple beats and shout-along melodies. While the show has been a hit, winning the little-kid demographic at its time slot (if not trumping juggernauts like Dora the Explorer), the show has developed considerable buzz as a hipster favorite, in large part because of some points my mom was touching on: its phantasmagorical absurdity and straight-faced wackiness.

Yo Gabba Gabba that taps into some of the most primative reasons we watch moving pictures: shapes and sounds and rhythms and colors. My goodness, the colors: As you can tell from the picture I decided to include, Yo Gabba Gabba stretches across the rainbow and saturates everything. It’s bright and fun and, as central figure DJ Lance Rock, likes to say, it’s “awwweeeesoooooooomme!”

Another key to the show’s popularity with the young twenty-somethings is that it’s been a fertile breeding ground for inspired guest starring. The pilot featured Biz Markie in “Biz’s Beat of the Day.” Though he’s best remembered for his semi-novelty track “Just a Friend,” in which he whines and wails, Biz Markie has slightly more cred as a funny freestyler and beatboxer.

Markie threw himself into the role so unabashedly, and fit the vibe of the show so well, that it really worked and set a precedent for having stars of various caliber on the show acting like they really want to be there and make kids get up and move. Another representative example is Elijah Wood, who is not only a random enough celebrity to be cool and unpredictable, but is introduced as “Elijah,” not “Elijah Wood, star of upcoming animated film 9, coming to theaters this September!”

Most celebrities on Yo Gabba Gabba are there just for the fun of it, not for self-promotion, which adds to the charm. There’s no sly references to the guest’s real life persona or even acknowledgment that anyone is famous or notable. It’s just someone else to sing a “Dancey Dance” song.

Here’s an incomplete list of guest star appearances. I love how eclectic and broad the collection is:

• Biz Markie
• Fashion designer Paul Frank’s Julius the Monkey
• Andy Samberg
• The Aquabats
• The Aggrolites
• Hector Jimenez
• Smoosh
• Devo
• Sean Kingston
• Tony Hawk
• Shiny Toy Guns
• Rahzel
• The Shins
• Melora Hardin (actress from The Office)
• Jack McBrayer (actor from 30 Rock)
• Jimmy Eat World
• Hot Hot Heat
• The Ting-Tings
• The Roots
• Jack Black
• Weezer
• MGMT
• “Weird Al” Yankovic
• Sarah Silverman
• Black Kids
• of Montreal
• Mos Def
• Mix Master Mike (of the Beastie Boys)
• Solange (Beyonce’s little sister)

Pretty impressive list, huh? Many of the more high-profile appearances have come in the past  several months. I doubt it’ll be long before Jay-Z or Tom Hanks makes an appearance. I’m not the only one to have noticed the strange popularity of the show. The hipsters’ fixation, like the show itself, is quite amusing and worth keeping an eye on.

Parks and Rec has been the most consistent and reliable of NBC’s comedies this year. So, did the finale hold up the show’s standard of greatness, or did it crack under the finale pressure? Read my take after the break.

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Spoilerific reviews of the finale of one of my favorite seasons of television in awhile after the jump

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There are lots of reasons I love NBC’s sitcom Community. After last night, there’s one more. One of the subplots of the episode was Chevy Chase’s out-of-touch character Pierce trying to coin the term “streets ahead” as a synonym for “much cooler than.”  On its own, it was a pretty funny and bizarre thread. But the origin story makes it legendary.

First, the backstory: Hulu.com had a fan-voted “best of TV” bracket along the lines of March Madness that had fans vote for which TV shows they like more. Community pulled out some big early upsets, toppling the more popular Glee and Modern Family. The former win was especially unexpected considering the show has received some media attention for its “Gleek” hardcore fans, the type who might troll online polls.

Anyways, not long after these first and second round wins, Community creator and writer Dan Harmon made this tweet from his account, @danharmon:

• RT @amyfairycakes both Modern Family and Glee are streets ahead of your meta bullshit
• ~ this tweet’s theme song: http://bit.ly/c3XUSh

He then spent the rest of the day — and week and month — mocking “amyfairycakes” (and the Botti video) for using the term “streets ahead”.

• “Streets ahead! [trumpet] Get your lingo out of the bed! [tambourine] You don’t have to say miles, you can use the word streets instead!”
• “Streets ahead! [twang] Light years and leagues are dead! [trumpet] use a word that makes your measurements sweeter than cinnamon bread!”
• “They call me Streets, last name Ahead, and I’m the longest distance you ever said!” #StreetsAhead

The joke was elevated into absurdity (worthy of the creator of a show as absurd as Community) with this:

• An important message! http://bit.ly/9C1vaj #StreetsAhead

And he just w0uldn’t let it go:

• Office and P&R are TIED in that Hulu thing 50/50 right now. Hate to see them fight so I’m glad neither is losing. #WeAreStreetsAheadOfMF
• [that last one in reference to a battle between Office and Parks & Rec in the Hulu bracket]
• Also, I’m working 24/7 to get the phrase “Streets Ahead” into common parlance. The PSA if you missed it: http://bit.ly/bIJzVe

Fan Tim Stoltz suggested that Harmon bring “streets ahead” into the world of Community, but it seems Harmon was one step ahead of him.

• @tim_stoltz : @danharmon Your hatred of “Glee” has made its way into “Community;” how long till your new favorite phrase makes it?
• @danharmon : @tim_stotz I’m putting it in the current script, so it’ll be a few weeks. But I have to get the world understanding it by then!

He occasionally used the term out the next few weeks on his Twitter, but the real payoff came last night when the (quite excellent) episode finally aired. Phenomenal work, Harmon.

Moral of the story: If you want your stupid slang to be immortalized, make fun of a slightly vengeful, hilarious TV writer.

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EDIT: Claimed by amyfairycakes and a commenter, and verified by a friend who lives over there, “streets ahead” is a British/Irish term that’s relatively common over there. Fair enough. Hamon was evidently aware of this but continued unfazed with the mocking anyways.

• @amyfairycakes – @danharmon streets ahead is already in common parlance in ireland & UK, it’s not a wacky phrase I just conjured up.
• @danharmon – @amyfairycakes You’re telling me the only two words you put together that moved me aren’t yours? But aren’t you a writer? You said “meta.”

Do you know about The Moonlighting Fallacy? It’s an incorrect theory that TV shows can’t resolve conflict or change any of their fundamental dynamics because it will cause the shows to crumble creatively and commercially. It primarily applies to U.S.T. – unresolved sexual tension. The most common victims are sitcoms and/or dramedies. Shows are scared to do something like put a couple together in a stable relationship because, then, what will keep the viewers coming? What juicy conflict will drive the show and hook bigger and bigger audiences?

The Moonlighting Fallacy (named because the bizarre downfall of a TV show called Moonlighting after it hooked up two of its main characters) has had all sorts of negative effects, minor and major, on shows throughout the years through gutless television writing and plotting. I hate gutless TV because it doesn’t trust viewers to differentiate between quality and comfortable familiarity. The worst part is that shows usually decide to start living by The Moonlight Fallacy right at the top of their game, or at some sort of pivotal turning point. I’ll get to some examples in a few paragraphs.

It’s like when the Patriots decided to start playing conservative football for the first time all season in the Super Bowl against the Giants. Everybody favored the Patriots in that game, and the Patriots seemed to bank almost entirely on this fact instead of playing the kind of football that got them that far.

In short, I hate it when shows I like don’t trust me to still like their show even if they take creative risks and change the dynamic of the show. It infuriates me. Here are a few of the worst examples that have been on my mind recently.

(I figure I might as well make what I assume to be an implicit spoiler warning explicit here. I talk freely about shows’ plots in the upcoming paragraphs.)

Friends

This is perhaps the most nefarious example of all. After an a’ight pilot, the show gradually improved in quality throughout the first season. By the second season, the writing was great, the characters likable, the romantic tension truly compelling. Ross is the lovable lug who had long secretly pined for Rachel. How long will it take her to realize it?

And then she finally does! And she realizes how great he’s always treated her, and that she’d love to be with him, too! She makes this discovery while Ross is on a business trip. But of course, Ross finally decides to move on from Rachel. He gets a new girlfriend while on his trip.

In the interest of not ruining Ross’s relationship, Rachel decides not to reveal her new feelings. So now, their roles are reversed. This was a pretty brilliant scheme: The writing was good enough and the characters developed enough that the situation-flip allowed for a hilarious alternate reality from the first season.

And then finally, Ross realizes that Rachel is into him. (Leading to one of the show’s all time great lines, after Rachel lies in a drunken phone message “I’m over you,” Ross says “You’re over me? You’re over me? When were you… under me?”) Of course, then Ross had to make the difficult decision to end things with his steady girlfriend or start over with the girl of his dreams.

But when he makes the tough decision to ditch Julie and date Rachel, the gutless television writing begins. We’ve had Ross pine for Rachel. We’ve had Rachel pine for Ross. They’ve decided they want to be together. There’s an obvious next logical step: Try putting them together. Roll with that for awhile. The characters are well-developed and the writers are competent.

Instead, the show pulls out some half-assed obstacle to keep the two pining for each other. If  you want to see an episode that will make you angry, go see The One With the List, the eighth episode of the second season. It’s incredibly frustrating.

I suppose the new obstacle presented a slightly different dynamic, where Ross overtly pined for Rachel instead of secretly pining for Rachel, but it was really the same thing, so all of the gags seemed tired and redundant. An incredible episode, arguably the best in Friends history (The One with the Prom Video) finally hooked them up, almost making the stupid delay worth it.

And, for awhile, the show creatively explored new area with Ross and Rachel together. It captured the beginning of their relationship, the disconnect between the two’s personalities, and their friend’s responses — all done pretty credibly. Unfortunately, somebody in charge, whether it be a writer or a producer, decided the show was losing steam. People don’t love Ross and Rachel when they stay together, these people decided. They love Ross and Rachel when they long to be together and eventually get together briefly. Who needs character development?

So they repeated this plot. For eight more years. No, seriously. This same exact plot for eight more years. Talk about gutless. Alright, there are a few spins on it. One season they get together at a beach house! One season Ross almost gets together with someone else but says Rachel’s name at the altar, so he gets together with Rachel instead! One season they get together while drunk in Vegas and get married! They always break up (often blaming it on this one time Ross sort-of cheated on Rachel even though, as Ross claims about 1000 times, they “were on a break!”), but they keep on keeping on. Getting together one more time won’t hurt, right?

It is heartbreaking to witness the gradual downfall of a great sitcom into an unfunny, self-mocking farce by its tenth season. And guess how the show ended? Yep! Ross and Rachel get together. Just like the people always wanted.

The Office

I know what you’re expecting. I’m going to complain about how Jim and Pam, obviously perfect for each other, keep finding reasons to stay apart for three full seasons!

Wrong! This is probably the best a TV show has ever handled a romance. I challenge you to find me a better, more rewarding TV romance. I’ve looked, and I couldn’t find one. The pacing is quite slow, but there’s a deliberate plan, and every obstacle develops the characters a little bit more. Six seasons in, the Jim-Pam elements have been perfect about 80% of the time, and the flaws have been minor the other 20% of the time.

But The Office has had its share of gutless elements, particularly in the past two seasons. I briefly want to discuss two of them.

First, the character Holly. What a great character. Seriously, Holly is one of my favorite TV characters of all time, even though we only see her for seven episodes. After four seasons of witnessing Michael bumble through two awkward relationships – notably, a vitriolic hell with former boss Jan Levinson – the writers decide to try something much more challenging: A perfect match for the out-there, dysfunctional manager!

And so we meet Holly Flax at the very end of season four. She’s funny and dorky and kind and vulnerable. Credit actress Amy Ryan: all of this instantly detectable even as Holly is functional and seemingly normal as an HR officer. She and Michael hit it off pretty quickly. The irony that kills Jim is that Michael actually seems to have more moves than Jim. This juxtaposition is really one of the more brilliant moves that The Office writers have made, which is why the end of season 4 and beginning of season 5 are some of my most rewatched episodes.

Just as we see Michael developing a healthy, steady relationship that gives him growth… It disappears. Holly gets shipped away because the CEO is worried. I suppose this could be thematically intentional. Perhaps the writers see Michael as a Sisyphus character, doomed to repeat his suffering forever for metaphysical reasons. The world just works against him. It’s also possible that the show simply couldn’t afford Ryan as a regular, or she would’ve rather focused on movies.

But I don’t like it. I call it gutless. We get Holly and Michael for a whopping six episodes, who call it off just as it starts to settle down between them. I will credit the show for making the break-up just as moving and saddening as any real breakup. There’s no deus ex machina thrown in, like Holly secretly being a vampire or having a secretly evil personality, to prevent the break-up from being challenging to viewers.

If the show had to break up the characters, I’m glad they did the way they did. It nearly brought me to tears. I just know that the characters would’ve and should’ve stayed together longer then they had. There was a lot of plot and character growth to milk from a romantically stable Michael Scott. More than a few episodes worth.

This brings me to the other instance of gutless television writing in the show’s fifth season: The Michael Scott Paper Company. It’s not the plot arc itself, or really any part of it, that I have a problem with. It’s the arc’s length. The show slowly built up to this climactic change to The Office dynamic: Michael leaving Dunder-Mifflin. It gave the characters several great moments leading to Michael starting the company.

But, for some reason, after all that hard and brilliant work setting up The Michael Scott Paper Company, the show gave up after four measly episodes, two of which were about the company’s first couple of days. It really had the potential to last at least half a season, if not a whole season. The change in dynamic was a breath of fresh air for a show that otherwise was bordering on tiredness.

Again, it’s not the way the show handled the abrupt conclusion — “Broke,” the episode Michael reunites with Dunder-Mifflin, might be one of the five best in the series history — it’s more the existence and timing of the abrupt conclusion. Again, I blame fear or tepidness of fundamentally changing the show into something a little bit different and more complex.

Unfortunately, it seems these questionable instances of TV writing during the fifth season were foreshadowing to the sixth season which is a monogamist with gutless plotting. Don’t even get me started on this season’s downfall of arguably my favorite TV show ever.

How I Met Your Mother

I want to stress that perhaps the most frustrating part of The Moonlighting Fallacy is that TV writers decide to stick to it at the most pivotal times, even if they’ve been bravely defying the fallacy so far. This especially applies to my least favorite instance of gutless television from the past half decade, the fifth season of How I Met Your Mother.

The show spent all of the third and fourth season scaffolding a pretty major change in dynamic that violated another long-assumed sitcom rule: Don’t have a main love interest hook up with another character than the one they’re originally linked with. I call this the Joey-Rachel Axiom after the brief affair between the two Friends’ characters in the ninth and tenth seasons that just felt so unnatural.

Yet, HIMYM credibly pulled it off, and with its most caricatured main character: Barney. On the other end was main character Ted’s initial interest, Robin. The show spent all of season three slowly and successfully building chemistry between the two. The fourth season beautifully allowed Barney to mature from his womanizing ways as he learned to live with the tender part of his personality.

Finally, the show eased the characters together in the Season 4 finale and the opening episodes of Season 5. The show seemed poised to pace the romance over several seasons, if not until the end of the series. It showed a different side of the characters that was a comfortable breath of fresh air.

And then… they flush it all down the toilet seven episodes in. They pull a cheesy breakup episode with almost no emotional fallout in subsequent episodes. After two seasons of hard work to make the two a credible, entertaining, maturing couple, they decide they like simple, debauchery-loving Barney over human character Barney.

At first, I convinced myself the “breakup” was more of a temporary break, a roadblock for the RoBarn couple. But interviews and later confirmed that this was a permanent breakup. Even worse, interviews with the writers confirmed that the choice to break the pair up was intentionally gutless television; they didn’t want to lose one of their “big draws,” Barney the single womanizer.

I’m highly offended the writers believe people watch the show because of a recurring gag and not because of funny writing, well-developed characters, and attention to detail. I know for me it was the overall quality of the show, not a few funny elements.

Anyways, these are a few of the examples of otherwise good shows losing their courage at the worst times. I have about a dozen more I could share, but I’m sure you can think of plenty on your own.

Sorry for the lack of posts recently. Football season, TV season, and academic season all start at the same time, and it’s hit me pretty hard. Nonetheless, I wanted to try something new for the site: Discussing some TV. I know our tagline is movies and music but TV is really an offshoot of film, and, in many ways, I think the serialized, episodic medium begets more interesting discussion.

Here, I discuss the first season of Veronica Mars, which I just recently finished viewing on DVD. The first half of this post is spoiler-free. In the second half, I openly evaluate details of the conclusion of the season with spoilers. Since this is a mystery show, I suggest you avoid the second half if you’re considering ever watching this show.

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What makes a pilot episode of a TV series a good one?

To me, there’s just one obvious criterion: It has to make me want to keep watching the show. In that regards, Veronica Mars is easily the best pilot I’ve ever seen. It’s so full of intrigue, sparkles with such wit, and sets up such dramatic plot arcs that I didn’t hesitate for a second to press play on episode two.

What’s impressive about the pilot is that it piles on one layer of dread after another, and yet is ultimately memorable for the dignity it gives its characters. Even as the flashbacks about breakup, abandonment, rape, and murder pile on, the show refocuses on the powerful bond between Veronica and her father. The gripping final narration of the pilot puts emphasis on the characters not just as plot devices but as compelling people.

The pilot displays, in full force, the strengths of the show: great acting, a diverse cast, techno-noir visuals, Bogart-meets-Buffy heroine, and a razor-sharp wit. Even amidst the darkness of the plot, the pilot radiates with energy and polish. To see ideas so fully formed in the opening episode of a complex TV show is surely a mark that the series is headed in a good direction.

But therein lies the problem — also, the fun — of mystery stories: Almost always, the intrigue and the set-up is more interesting than the actual solution. And it’s true in the first season of Veronica Mars. There really was no way the show could match the fever pitch of intrigue in the pilot for an entire 22-episode season.

Miraculously, there are no bad episodes in the entire season, though some are admittedly better than others. The show’s decision to split each episode about 75%-25% between the mystery of the week and the serial mystery pays off well. We get a constant progression in the recurring plots that drew us to the show, but it’s not played out to a level that gets tiring.

The solutions of the big mysteries set up in the pilot generally do not disappoint, either. You can rest assured that there is a satisfying — though not perception-shattering — conclusion on its way.

It’s hard to go into too much description of plots or characters without giving any spoilers, but I will say that Logan develops from pretty generic into one of the most complicated characters on the show. His development is impressive, but he’s not the best character on the show.

Excepting the Kristen Bell-portrayed title character, the award for best character and acting goes to Keith Mars, Veronica’s dad, played by Enrico Colantoni, who steals every scene he’s in with a believable balance of protective father and detached professionalism. Also, virtually every scene with Francis Capra’s Weevil is a great one. Though he’s seen in every episode, I think he’s underutilized.

Duncan Kane, played by Teddy Dunn, is inconsistent and imperceptible, but I think that’s part of the point of the character. Still, I found it difficult to really empathize and connect with him except for in a few scenes and episodes.

Really, though, its Ms. Bell and her heroine that steal the show. The mysteries that Veronica solves are, for the most part, interesting not only because they’re well-constructed whodunits but because they’re as much about Veronica figuring herself out than they are figuring the culprit out.

We’re shown from the start that she’s a hard-nosed snark with a very quick tongue, but the character wouldn’t work if we didn’t see the undercurrent of a normal teenage girl in her. She flirts and wants to be adored. She takes on bigger problems than she can handle. She trusts her gut when she shouldn’t and needs others to bail her out. She’s manipulative and vengeful and overly dramatic — but sympathetic. You can’t blame her for acting like an adolescent act even if her problems are a bit bigger than a normal teen’s.

Bell captures all of this effortlessly. She’s cheerleader-beautiful, but bitter and strange enough that you can see why she’d be an outcast. When the moments call for it, she can drop her cold exterior and demonstrate her inner marshmallow quite convincingly.

Yet, the character can be a bit much. I really think she’s a bit too manipulative. She could’ve been ruthless and tortured, but less over-the-edge flawed. The amount of ‘favors’ she extracts from friends, and lies she tells her dad, makes it hard for me to always root for her.

Also, I know she’s a sleuth prodigy and all, but sometimes she pieces together and pulls off just a bit too much. If we could see her occasionally fail to figure it all out would pay great dividends on making her believable and pitiable, I think.

The show’s flaws fall outside of the Veronica character, as well. As much as I love the writing and the plots, sometimes I feel like they’re just a bit too twisty and and edgy for their own good. Sometimes, more than shock me, it just makes me role my eyes. Child-teacher relationships? Scientology-like cult? Some of it feels a bit tired at times.

Something that might date the series a little bit and turn off old-fashioned mystery fans is the shows heavy use of technology: texting, cell phones, the Internet, online databases, webcams, and more are all staples as clues. While this personally didn’t bother me, the portrayal of technology is distractingly inaccurate at times.

But, these flaws are absolutely overpowered by such a vibrant cast and plot and writing that I have to whole-heartedly endorse the first season of Veronica Mars. It brilliantly weaves plots together and manages to pull out surprising conclusions nearly every time, all the while sparkling with wit and energy. Give the incredible pilot a go and you won’t look back.

From here on out, I discuss the first season of Veronica Mars with full out spoilers for everything that happens in the first season’s episodes, up to and including the end of the season. Remember that this is a mystery show, so I suggest not continuing unless you’ve seen the first season.

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