Episode Report Card Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Sometimes Those Who Teach Can Also Do
By Couch Baron | Season 1 | Episode 15 | Aired on 03.02.2005
CB: You mentioned "The Girl Next Door." I have to tell you that's my least favorite episode. RT: Yeah, for me, it's a tie between that and "Credit Where Credit's Due." We had a nice thirteen days to shoot the pilot, and then suddenly we're on this tight schedule and Paris Hilton is showing up whenever she wants, and it was really stressful. Veronica Mars is a hard show to film, in that there are a lot of scenes and a lot of players. You don't find that problem on a show like, say, Gilmore Girls, where most of the scenes are lengthy dialogue between two people. And I was really working hard on the showrunning aspect as well. CB: Speaking of showrunning, we skipped over this before, but I wanted to ask you about your brief time at Snoops. I've heard a few things about you and David E. Kelley. RT: I bear him no ill will, but he's...an odd duck. The way David runs a show is that he writes it, and he lets other people cast and edit and run the production. He writes, and more power to him. He certainly cared about Snoops -- if he hadn't, he would have just handed it off to me. But it's like he's autistic -- he's off in script world. He writes faster and more than any writer I've ever seen, but I think the tradeoff in that is that he's not present in the room in which he's in. You can have these conversations with him where you don't think he's talking to you -- he's writing the third act of next week's Ally McBeal. But clearly, he had a vision for Snoops that didn't match my vision. I think there's a sense that any writer who's worked over in the Kelley camp has that David only likes his own writing. But when I left the show, Entertainment Weekly asked him about my departure, and he actually had some very fair and nice things to say. He said I wanted to do a character- and humor-driven show, and he thought it should be more of a plot- and intrigue-driven show, which was fair and mostly accurate. But after the series ended, he told the Hollywood Reporter that the lesson he learned from Snoops was not to hand over a show to other producers. That's so offensive to me, because he didn't hand off the show. I was like, "That's your bomb, David. That's all you. Please step up and take responsibility for the show you did." And the funny thing is that three different people ran the show that year, and we were all offended. None of us know who specifically he was talking about, or if he was talking about all of us. But he ran that show. Anyway, it all worked out fine. I think I came up with the better detective show, so I feel like I won.