Our (Cult) Hero
Veronica: The year's coolest underdog
"I'm officially calling life unfair," teen sleuth Veronica Mars (
Kristen Bell) moaned after her dad lost a tight race for sheriff this month. And has she even seen the ratings? Talk about unfair.
Ironically, the two shows having the best sophomore seasons air opposite each other: the popular Lost and the equally fine but underwatched Veronica Mars (Wednesdays at 9 pm/ET on UPN). As the show's tiny but rabid fan base will tell you, this one actually gives you answers to its mysteries.
Mars' payoffs come in many ways: in the clever blend of heart-stopping whodunit and heartfelt teen soap, in the witty dialogue for characters young and adult, and in the biting depiction of class and racial tensions among the haves and have-nots of Neptune, Calif.
Sly, scrappy, yet emotionally vulnerable, Bell makes Veronica the toughest, funniest, most sympathetic cult heroine since Buffy the Vampire Slayer (whose creator, Joss Whedon, appeared in a cameo). She's an outsider torn between two social insiders: software scion Duncan (Teddy Dunn) and bad boy Logan (Jason Dohring), whose movie-star dad killed her best friend in last season's big murder mystery.
This year's puzzle is even more shocking: a rigged school-bus crash that may have been meant for Veronica. Wracked with survivor's guilt, she investigates with her dad (the wonderfully wry Enrico Colantoni) when she's not busy coming of age or solving the occasional offbeat amateur-detective case.
Veronica Mars is too original a show to be easily pigeonholed and too good to get lost against Lost.
Going Ape
A movie pioneer whose life was as thrill-packed as his films, most famously 1933's classic King Kong, producer Merian C. Cooper gets the robust Turner Classic Movies treatment in I'm King Kong! The Exploits of Merian C. Cooper (Nov. 22 at 8 pm/ ET). With Kong mania high in anticipation of Peter Jackson's remake and the release of the original Kong on DVD, Cooper's colorful biography — from world explorer and aviator to early champion of Technicolor and Cinerama — is a riveting chapter of film and American history.
