So when we left off, I had just asked Rob if he would hear about the renewal decision in May. Here's what he had to say: Rob Thomas: Yeah, we'll definitely know by May. But a lot of writers and directors have been asking me to consider them for the second season. That doesn't exactly prove anything, but it doesn't really happen with dead shows either, you know? Couch Baron: Sure. Now I'd like to talk a little more about the pilot. I saw the unaired version of the pilot over the summer, and it looked pretty much the same as the one that aired in terms of casting. Even afterward, the only actor I saw changed was that Jake Kane wasn't originally played by Kyle Secor. RT: Well, that was just because Jake had no lines in the pilot, so it didn't make sense to pay Kyle Secor $50,000 for that episode. But yeah, other than that, the cast was the same. However, one other thing that really annoyed me about the script they went with was that they changed the very beginning. The original version of the pilot started at the motel with a voice-over that said "I'm never getting married, and I don't believe in love." You didn't know who was speaking, and then you saw it was this high-school girl. Then Weevil and the bikers pull up and ask about car trouble, and that's the end of the teaser. And then when the action starts at the high school, the caption reads "20 hours earlier." CB: I remember that. That opening voice-over would have been an interesting counterpoint to the one she does at the end of the episode about getting her family back together. RT: Yeah. I loved that beginning, but the network handed me a note that basically said that since the show is about high school, it should start in the high school. I was so mad. But they were sure that getting young people to watch would be too tough with the original pilot. CB: I bet if you took people who watch the show now and tested the two, they'd like your version better. RT: I think so too. And I was so pissed off, I actually wrote a terribly cheesy voice-over in the new script out of spite. CB: Heh. You sure you want this printed? RT: Well, barely. But the really funny thing is that that act of spite came back to haunt me. I took that line back out for the script we used, but a reviewer for the L.A. Times wrote a review of the show before I changed it, and he loved the show, but he singled that line out for criticism!
CB: [laughs] Oh, no! RT: Yeah. CB: I have to point out that you did recast Backup! What happened there? RT: I couldn't deal with his trainer. I loved the original Backup -- he was such a beautiful dog. But his trainer had a month and a half to get him ready for the scene in the pilot, and he didn't do it. He needed to fly out of the car, and he just couldn't -- he sort of slid down the window. So a stuntman had to pull him out on his arm. Then, to make it look good, he was supposed to attack the biker, who was wearing protective padding, but he wouldn't do that either. We had to cut together all this footage and loop in growling. It was just a mess, and the trainer blamed us! So rather than strangle the guy, I recast Backup. CB: Now I have to say I really didn't like Keith that much in the pilot. He came off to me as overly hammy, and against the backdrop of how dark the episode is, I kind of found it wildly incongruous. But since then, I've totally liked him, so I was wondering if he's been written a little bit differently, maybe with a little less caffeine? RT: Well, I liked Keith in the pilot. But I love Rico. You know, when I was casting Veronica, I saw a lot of terrible actresses. That wasn't the case with Keith -- when you're casting a character actor like that, everyone you see can do a fine job. In Rico's case, we could only see him audition when he came in for the network. But I loved him in Galaxy Quest, and I really liked him for the part. I think what you mention is a case of everyone just getting familiar with the show, including me. I have heard that criticism before, and maybe I could have dialed back his energy ten percent or so, but people would still have wanted another twenty. But I definitely wanted some good energy between him and Veronica. And Rico has been such a positive force in the show and on the set. CB: And I've been impressed that he goes to the publicity events with the young actors too. RT: Yeah. It's great that he does. CB: It did seem to me that the series changed in tone a little bit after the pilot. Even though there's plenty of humor in that episode, there's so much traumatic backstory that it comes off as pretty dark. Did you hesitate at all to pile so much on the audience at once? RT: I was nervous about it. Pilots that test really well are the ones that have a clearly defined good guy and bad guy, and are very straight and linear, and you know who to root for and you've got big, heroic, happy moments. So I suspected, given the juxtaposed time and the darkness, that it wouldn't be a pilot that tested particularly well, and that was proven out. It did okay, though -- better than I'd hoped.
CB: One other thing that disappeared is all the references in the pilot toThe Wizard Of Oz. Was that originally intended to be an ongoing theme? RT: [laughs] I was thinking yesterday of including a "better go see the wizard" moment in the season finale. In the original pilot script, Lamb tells Wallace to grow up and get some balls, which I couldn't air, but I had to write something that resonated, because Veronica was going to hear it later. It's an odd bit of dialogue -- it actually stems from my high-school football coach. He'd say, "You'd better go down to Albertson's and buy yourself some guts." It was inspired by that, and you might hear it again in the season finale, because it's fun for the people who've been there since the beginning. CB: One thing I really like is that the show keeps me guessing, both with the mysteries of the week and with the more seasonal arcs. For example, I loved the reveal in "You Think You Know Somebody," when first we learn Icetwin (Troy Vandergraff) isn't squeaky clean, but we think he might still be halfway decent, and then...not so much. I find myself having zigged when I should have zagged. RT: I'm glad you said that, because that was a moment that said to us -- well, I don't want to state this too grandly, but it said that nothing's sacred, that we'll do anything. I was so upset that week when the network teased with "Veronica's boyfriend: Is he bad?" We had presented him as this edgy but really nice guy, and what the hell's the network doing? Speaking of which, last night I went through the roof when I saw the teaser they did between the second and third act, when they show Veronica at Mr. Rooks's door and he's inviting her in, and they play the creaky music, and she kind of gets this frightened smile. CB: Heh. I watched that on DVR, so I blew right by it. RT: As I said, I about hit the roof, and I think they gave away our huge twist for week's episode ["Ruskie Business"]. I am so angry with them today. It's been a constant battle, like, tease the red herring -- don't tease the actual ending. And it's embarrassing I'm going to admit this, but the way I learned about that promo was not originally from watching the episode, but from checking in on the Television Without Pity boards after the East Coast airing to see what people were saying. They were like, "Why did they give away the ending in the middle of the show?"
CB: Man, promo departments. Okay, moving on, you also do a great job, it seems to me, of being subtle, whether it's in clues, dialogue, or characterization. We often use the word "anvilicious" to describe the clunkiness and ham-fistedness of many of the shows we recap. I haven't really had to use it with Veronica Mars, but it certainly was thrown around enough in the Dawson's days. RT: [laughs] Honestly, and this will probably come back to haunt me, but I think everything on the WB network is like that. That network takes a lot of control of their shows, and they have a formula and they like it and they think it works, and I swear to God, no one on that network has a thought that they don't express. It's what I call "emotional exposition," and I hate it. I hate it. I'm a pretty wordy writer, and we love writing our dialogue -- it's not like we shy away from dialogue. But generally speaking, I like people to be backed into corners before they share their feelings, or you kill that part of the story. It's the whole "show, don't tell" -- let the emotions be the subtext, and let the dialogue be in the way of what the characters are trying to hide. CB: Not to ruin my TWoP cred with too much praise, but the continuity editing is strikingly good as well. You must really not want us to nitpick you. RT: Well, we take it so seriously, and at the same time, I know we screw up from time to time. I know it's hard for me to keep track of, and I'm so immersed in it. And we know that the two weeks of Duncan breaking up with Veronica, Lilly dropping Logan, Lilly murdered -- we know that we've jam-packed -- we've got, like, eighty-six events happening in that little stretch of time. But any flashbacks before then would take the kids ["except Lilly" -- CB] back to their freshman year, and we've got our twenty-three- and twenty-four-year-old actors. At the beginning of the year, I gave every writer a chart, and I put every event that I knew had happened in the past on that chart, but I knew -- twenty episodes later, it's a cluttered, complicated situation. I'm hoping there aren't too many errors, and if there are, that they're small. CB: The one part of the show I get a little worried about sometimes is the voice-overs. While I think they're totally necessary for us to get inside Veronica's head, I'm always wary of them being overused for expository purposes. Is that something you guys debate at all?
RT: Yeah, and honestly, while UPN is very creatively kind to us, you'll hear a lot of voice-overs that are strictly network. "We don't understand why Veronica went to the lumberyard." And then you get that painful voice-over of "I'm going to the lumberyard because..." We try to write it so you don't need verbal exposition. The other thing is that sometimes we'll have to cut a scene for length, so we throw in a voice-over to cover the missing action, and it does become expository. If you read the original pilot script, you'll see how I intended for voice-over to be used. The interesting thing is that we had a long, long conversation at the beginning of the year about what tense to use. The easiest thing to do is use past tense in the voice-overs, but it also takes away the immediacy of it. If the story's over and we've all survived, we're looking back on it and we're not in the moment. CB: Now, the flashbacks. I really like them, even though sometimes it seems like they raise as many questions as they answer. They seem to add to what we've seen from the characters in the present, rather than betraying it, which is a problem I've seen on other shows. RT: I'm using more flashbacks than I originally envisioned when we started the year. I'm not interested in those sort of procedural, C.S.I.-type shows in which you tell the murder investigation based on carbon fibers and blood samples -- I always wanted to create interesting character stuff like motive and jealousy and passion and rage, so using the flashbacks allows me to get to the heart of why characters become what they become. I have to admit, they're fun for us. CB: The one thing about the flashbacks is that they're very...blue. In fact, there's a LOT of color filtering and lighting on the show. Are you going for specific moods or themes? Do you all debate whether it gets excessive? RT: Well, we wanted the flashbacks to have a distinct look just so it would be clear when we were in one. But we gave a different colorization and treatment to the two-day flashbacks in "An Echolls Family Christmas," where it wasn't Veronica's memories. And in the latest episode we've filmed, Veronica manages to get hold of Keith's interrogation tapes, and she's listening to them and flashing back, and that's not her memory, so we gave that a completely different look from the other two. So we are trying to be stylish, and honestly, for me it's the first time I've been on a show that's attempted to have some sort of visual flair.
CB: Recently, the show has experimented with a couple scenes in which the editing was kind of...jumpy, for example, the karaoke scene in "Clash Of The Tritons." What did you think of the finished product there? RT: I read all the complaints on the boards about the karaoke scene, and I understand them -- it did seem to break style, and probably if we did it all over again, I wouldn't do it that way. I think it somehow pissed off the audience. Part of it was cutting a three-minute performance into fifty seconds, and having nine different angles and wanting to use them. But I guess it was the quick cutting that really bothered people. I don't think it was a stylistic choice as much as it kind of felt fun and energetic in that moment, but given the reaction, I would hesitate to do it again. CB: Speaking of the karaoke scene, I know it's been done, but...musical episode? Is that anything you'd consider, or is that strictly shark and motorcycle territory? RT: Here's the thing: Kristen is the only singer we have. So that will prevent us from doing a musical episode. But when we do jump the shark, our plan is the Clue episode. Now you know. CB: A bit about Veronica's character. As personable as she is, she definitely dances on an ethical slippery slope quite often. Do you worry at all about making her unsympathetic? Is that a place you'd be willing to go? RT: I worry a great deal more about making her soft. I mean, I'm so on the other side of the fence on that -- I worry more about her becoming cute and lovable, bordering-on-popular Veronica Mars, and everybody loves her -- that will make me nervous. The funny thing about what private eyes do -- there's a lot of talk on the boards about how wrong it was that Veronica broke in and stole Duncan's medical files. But that's what private eyes do -- they invade privacy. People are asking if she'll get her comeuppance, and maybe, but there's no great plan for that. I want to keep her edgy, and something that I like about the network is that they haven't made her a good girl. I remember pitching story ideas on Dawson's Creek, and it was always, "Oh, no, then people won't like Katie Holmes." CB: Wow, and I couldn't have hated her more as it was. [Rob laughs.] And speaking of whom, what's with everyone using Veronica's first and last names? RT: Ah! I'm so glad you asked that question!
CB: Well, I have to make sure it's not some sort of homage to Joey Potter. RT: Oh, no. To me, it's just that the two names sound great together. "Veronica Mars" rolls off the tongue really well. But people pointed out to me -- before it ever aired, we were in the editing room working on the pilot, and I realized how many times it was in there, and we started this joke that it was a drinking game. You sip on every "Veronica," and you chug on every "Veronica Mars." And we were thinking of an idea in the office where Veronica runs for school office, and people would be reading off the ballots, "Veronica Mars, Veronica Mars..." I'm going to set up the rules for the Veronica Mars drinking game when I get my site up. CB: Well, if they show up on our forums, you'll inspire a lot of drunken Tuesday-night posting. RT: And when we're sitting around watching clips or watching dailies, when we hear "Veronica Mars," people in the room say "Drink!" even though we're not drinking. But we think the name sounds good. CB: Veronica does a lot of seriously techy stuff. I mean, she's not quite Sydney Bristow, but how much research have you all had to do on surveillance and spy techniques and the like? RT: Well, we have a PI who was on the payroll for the first thirteen episodes, and is still a consultant on the show. Now, once or twice an episode, he'll get an email from us asking something like "How would you go about getting a fake passport?" "How far will this kind of microphone transmit?" And we'll get a response back and work it into the story. One of the things we found out that would kill the show if we did it accurately is just how much they can do on the computer, because we don't want to be the show where Veronica's in front of the computer all the time. CB: That's funny, because some people have complained that she gets as much information as she does from the computer. RT: PIs can just do everything on the computer, but whenever possible, we try to make it fun and interesting. "Lord Of The Bling" wasn't the most popular of episodes, but the fun part for us was her having to pretend to be the hospitality host, and taking the rap group up to the room and showing them around and then bugging it. That's fun. CB: You said in the forums that you think the show has gotten better over the first half-season. What do you perceive as having improved?
RT: We're getting better at writing the characters and knowing actors' strengths. Also, the crew keeps getting better -- we use a San Diego crew, and when you get out of L.A., the crews tend to be less experienced. But instead of shooting fifty-seven- or fifty-eight-page scripts and having to be sloppy and run long, we write forty-nine- or fifty-page scripts, and that works better all the way around, because it focuses the crew's energy on the pages that are actually going to make it into the show. Also, we've gotten enough feedback so that we know not only what we like, but what the audience responds to. CB: Let's talk about the mysteries. If they're all going to be solved by the end of the season, that means we're going to find out what happened with Lynn Echolls, who Veronica's dad is, who raped Veronica, where Lianne has been, what the deal is with her and Jake Kane, and of course, who killed Lilly. RT: That's right. CB: You do know there are only eight ["seven, now" -- CB] episodes left in the season, right? RT: [laughs] Yeah, but it's all there. They're going to be jam-packed, and the A-stories are getting a little smaller and the B- and C-stories are getting a little bigger to accommodate that. And we're not having any B-stories that aren't Lilly Kane-related or where she isn't at least in the periphery. CB: I mentioned Veronica's parentage a little earlier. As I'm sure you're aware, the one plot point many posters really took issue with was when she shredded the paternity-test results. Were you surprised at the vehemence of that reaction? RT: You know, I don't know why, but I didn't catch much of that reaction. But I'll tell you exactly where I got that story point from and why I'm excited about it. This is so funny -- when I was a kid, the most powerful Spider-Man episodes that I read were these episodes in which there's a storyline where Peter Parker is cloned, and it's very existential, as he's faced with not knowing whether he's the real Peter or the clone. And he ends up fighting the clone or himself, he isn't sure which, and at the end of the episode, somehow he's got the results from the lab telling him whether he's a clone or not. But since he's in love with this girl, he decides he needs to be the real Peter, and doesn't want to prove it or disprove it, so he throws the results into a smokestack. And the thing I remember is that it was profound to me as a ten- or eleven-year-old kid, it made me think, so we had this idea of Veronica having the power to find out, but recognizing -- having that emotion of "this is the man I want to be my father, and I don't want to disprove that."
CB: Now, you said in the forums that another producer on the show described reading TWoP as like "getting hit with a tidal wave of love tempered by a million paper cuts." Do you guys read the site and go, "Uh huh, uh huh...oh, OUCH." RT: Oh, yeah. I don't read every single post, but I read a lot of them, and that's totally how it is. Just last week, "Lord Of The Bling" wasn't the most popular episode at all, but we try to take that in stride. I didn't worry so much about last night's episode ["Mars vs. Mars"] because I'm really confident that it's good, but I'm wondering about the reaction for week's -- well, it's funny, because our Veronica Mars team likes last night's episode as much as any episode, but the network thinks week's episode ["Ruskie Business"] is our best episode. It's a bit lighter, a bit smuttier -- it's the first time I've ever turned the script over and heard back from the network that they had no notes at all. In my entire career that's never happened. I sort of suspect, though, and I could be totally wrong, that the hardcore Veronica Mars fans will think week's episode is good, but not the best, but the casual fan will think it's great. CB: Let's go back to the characters for a bit. Miss Dent. Was there just too much other story going on to fit her in the way you wanted? RT: Sydney Tamiia Poitier is a really talented actress, but we weren't finding enough storylines for her and we were also way over our cast budget. The crazy thing is that our show was budgeted to have three guest stars a week. With some shows, where they're all about the recurring cast or the series regulars, that's possible, but with detective shows, you need the clients, you need the victims, you need the people you're going to question, you need the red herring, so that cast budget wasn't working for us, and without Sydney in an episode, I could hire three more guest stars. CB: A lot of posters lament the fact that Weevil doesn't get much screen time, although most concede that it's better for him to be underused than overused. Are we going to see more of him over the rest of the season? RT: You'll see him about the same amount. You'll have a bunch of episodes where he's in two scenes, and a couple where he's in three or four. But one thing people should know is that according to our actor deals, only Kristen, Percy, and Rico are in all the shows produced. Francis and Jason and Teddy are all seven of nine, or seven of nine in the back and ten of thirteen in the front. So we don't use them in some episodes not because we don't want to, but because contractually we don't have them.
CB: Now, Lilly Kane. I said in the forums that I thought Lilly being both believable and engaging was absolutely essential to get the audience totally invested in the murder investigation, and I think Amanda Seyfried has achieved that and more. What was that audition like? RT: We fell in love with Amanda, and we felt, as you say, when she's on the screen, that people would care about Lilly's death. But the crazy thing about Amanda, and I can't believe this, honestly, is that she read for the part of Veronica, and I don't remember her. CB: Seriously? With those eyes? RT: I know! I mean, I saw lots of girls, but she's so special. And when you tell somebody "You're going to have three lines in the pilot, and then you're the dead girl," the quality of the actresses that come in isn't that great. When it's a series regular or a series lead, all the best casting directors send their best people, but for the dead girl, 90% didn't want to come in and read. "Why would I want to be the dead girl?" And we kept trying to pitch them, "Laura Palmer!" But I ended up making Lilly's role twice as big as I intended coming into the season, because Amanda was so good. There was no one even close to her in the auditions. She's so alive and special, and she makes Lilly a character who can hold her own and even occasionally steal scenes from Veronica. CB: Now, some stuntcasting. You mentioned her already, so...Paris Hilton? RT: Well, Joel and I have our debates about the show sometimes, and we've gotten to a place where we're working pretty well together. But he's said to me, "You want your precious fucking show, and you won't let me promote it. Who cares if it's a great show if no one will watch it?" And Paris Hilton was in his House Of Wax movie, and he thought she would bring in viewers. CB: Well, we all understood that, and therefore forgave it. RT: Well, it was very kind, and everybody sort of knew what we were doing and what the thought process was. CB: And now you've got Alyson Hannigan. How did that come about? RT: At one point I mentioned in front of Joel that we had tinkered with the idea of Logan having an older sister. Joel, being Joel, was immediately like, "That's a fantastic idea -- get me a list of all the early twenties, hot actresses out there." And we turned over all these lists, but they were -- like, he wanted Tara Reid. And Tara Reid wouldn't come to our show. And this is where we have different philosophies, and I don't even mean to say that mine is the correct one, because I don't think that -- he raises very valid points. He says, "If you want to keep doing that precious little cult show on UPN, that's fine -- cast whoever you want. If you want people to watch, if you want to be on the air for Season 2, let me put someone in there who will bring people to the show." And it's a constant debate we have. But Alyson appeared on one of these lists, and I circled her name and said she would be great, and fun to play against Logan. When I called her and talked to her, it was a bit of a struggle to get her, but the fun part of it was that she was already a huge fan of the show, and one of the things that really excited her was getting to work with Jason. The thing working against us was the she said, "You guys are kind of the new Buffy, and will that be a real sideways move in my career if I come on the show?" She signed for two episodes this season, but we're not sure where we're going with it beyond that. If she doesn't get a pilot and get a show on the air, maybe we'll see her year.
CB: Can you tell us anything you have planned for Season 2? RT: No. And it's not that I'm keeping secrets, it's that I don't know. All I can say is that the network has made it very clear that they want another big mystery -- you know, a year-long thing, and they want it to be the kind of the same format. We've got ideas that we've bounced around about what that mystery could be. Originally, we were thinking of introducing it in the season finale, but now we're thinking that if we have Veronica solve the big case without taking a moment of victory, I think the audience would feel cheated. CB: Thank you so much, Rob -- this has been an absolute pleasure. I hope to speak with you again on behalf of TWoP. RT: My pleasure.