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Veronica Mars' Hulu revival is able to do what it does best since it already did fan service with the Kickstarter-funded movie

  • "TV revivals have too high a burden placed on them to succeed with any kind of consistency," says Alison Herman. "In bringing back a beloved show, the updated version must pay tribute to its predecessor while theoretically telling a story of its own. To up the degree of difficulty even further, this double responsibility is often squeezed into a fraction of the original’s run time: seven seasons of Gilmore Girls become just four episodes of Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life; three seasons of Deadwood are condensed into one movie. With such limited real estate, it’s little wonder most revivals tend to go for nostalgia over innovation. Justifying one’s existence can go two ways: giving the people what they want so they come away satisfied, or diverging enough from the template to surpass pale imitation. Give or take a Twin Peaks: The Return, the former tends to win out. The new season of Veronica Mars, though, is fortunate enough not to face this dilemma in the first place. After originally airing for three seasons on UPN and the CW, from 2004 to 2007, the teen-drama-cum-detective-noir has already received the crowd-pleasing treatment: a 2014 feature film, funded with Kickstarter and checking fan-wishlist boxes accordingly...But even though the Veronica Mars movie was arguably just a few years ahead of its time, that premature encore turns out to be something of a blessing. In retrospect, (creator Rob) Thomas characterizes the project as 'like looking at my Twitter feed and seeing what everyone wanted to see and making that more important than the detective case.' This is an accurate description of a movie that accommodates virtually every member of a sizable ensemble cast at the expense of its own plot. It also doubles as an overview of our current moment in pop culture, where everything from The Lion King to Fuller House inverts the typical promise of entertainment: Instead of showing you something you’ve never seen before, it shows you exactly what you’ve seen before to the point of excising anything you haven’t. Five years later, Veronica Mars has learned from its mistakes—or rather, Veronica Mars’ mistakes have freed it to do something new. The fans have long since been serviced. Thomas and his writers can now dedicate themselves to a case that exists as something more than a pretext. The result is, paradoxically, a truer reprise of the first series’ appeal than many revivals that strain much more visibly to channel their inspiration. Instead of reflecting the highlight reel that time and memory have turned Veronica Mars into, this eight-episode fourth season can go back to being Veronica Mars as it actually is."

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    TOPICS: Veronica Mars, Hulu, Kristen Bell, Rob Thomas (Writer), Revivals