The Story's Always Better Than The Truth - Cheerio, Veronica Mars:

The show's first season was the closest thing to a novel I've ever seen on telly - tightly structured, well characterised, compellingly events-led but also wittily subversive. As the title character, Kristen Bell put in a superlative performance, and much of the supporting cast was similarly top notch. Plot and sub-plot meshed perfectly, character and motivation never clashed, and I came to care about the most minor of characters.

The show was absurd, though. For all its interesting, even daring, touches - in the very first episode we learn that Veronica was drugged and raped at a party - it was a show about a teenage girl who was a detective. What saved it from idiocy was that, unlike Nancy Drew, Veronica lived in a noir world. The world was always on a downward turn, Veronica was always ultimately alone, and no one could be trusted. Though it liked to film in bright California sunlight, make with the peppy quips, and dress its characters in bright colours and hip clothing, Veronica Mars was a dark show.

No one expected this show to get renewed for a second season. When it did, there was much rejoicing amongst fans. Here is the point at which I wonder if I was a fan and not just a viewer - I wasn't as keen on the idea. I watched season one so late that season two had already started by the time I was done, but having watched that first batch of episodes I couldn't see lightning striking twice. I could not, in fact, see the point of it being done again. I hate novel series - one book, well done, tells you everything about its characters and world worth knowing. That first season had been a novel. I was wary of a series.

But watch the second season I did, and it became clear fairly quickly that lightning wasn't about to strike twice. Characters, always used well and to the service of the plot, began to become not just absent but forgotten for whole stretches of time. Plot threads were left dangling for no narrative reason, but merely because the writers hadn't figured how to get them back into the mix yet. If the dialogue itself was still as zippy and smart as ever, and the motives of the players as murky, there wasn't the same sense of momentum that had hurled me through the first season. It wasn't there because the writers simply couldn't structure another season as they had the first - a mystery with the amount of backstory and deeply personal connection to all the characters the first had had could not be constructed so quickly.

Perhaps the clues were always there. If the great first season had a weakness, it was that there were no real stand-out individual episodes (cue Niall Harrison: A Trip To The Dentist!). ie he expects his fellow livejournaller Niall to say that episode stood out.
and I guess it did. ggl fins someone else saying about a later Vm episode "Still, it was no Trip to the Dentist."
A Trip to the Dentist - Wkp: episode 21 of season 1 of the television show Veronica Mars, in which Veronica finally investigates what happened to her the night of Shelly Pomroy's party where she was drugged and date-raped and what she finds out is shocking.

It all ended perfectly, of course - Veronica's need to solve the mystery damaging the people around her, her father likely out on his ear as sheriff, her personal relationships shot to pieces, walking along down a rainy city street. That's noir, baby, and that's what I'm a fan of.