Veronica Mars is an American television series created by
Rob Thomas. The series premiered on September 22, 2004 during television network
UPN's final two years, and ended on May 22, 2007, after a season on UPN's successor,
The CW Television Network.
Veronica Mars was produced by
Warner Bros. Television, Silver Pictures Television, Stu Segall Productions, Inc and Rob Thomas Productions.
The executive producers for the first two seasons were
Joel Silver and Rob Thomas, and
Diane Ruggiero was promoted in the third season.
The series is set in the fictional town of Neptune,
California, and stars
Kristen Bell as the
title character, a student who progresses from
high school to
college while moonlighting as a
private investigator under the tutelage of her detective father. In each episode, Veronica solves a different stand-alone case while working to solve a more complex mystery. The first two seasons of the series had a season-long mystery arc, introduced in the first episode of the season and solved in the season finale. The third season took a different format, focusing on smaller mystery arcs that would last the course of several episodes.
Thomas originally wrote
Veronica Mars as a young adult novel, but decided to write a television version because it paid more. He changed the gender of the protagonist from a male because he thought a noir piece told from a female point of view would be more interesting and unique. Filming began in March 2004,
and the series premiered in September to 2.49 million American viewers.
The critically acclaimed first season's run of 22 episodes garnered an average of 2.5 million viewers per episode in the United States.
