Veronica Mars: The Complete Third Season
Veronica Mars: Season Three on DVD
Acquired by: Free copy from marketing firm
Rating: 4 out of 5
About a month ago, I gave a head’s up that I’d be reviewing the DVD set of Veronica Mars: The Complete Third Season. I’m a little overdue to talk about it, but better later than never!
Let’s just start by saying that I felt there’s no need to evaluate the actual episodes contained on these discs. We can take it as a given that Veronica Mars was a quality television program, worth watching, and it’s a sad loss for the fans that it never continued beyond the third season.
My review, then, is based mainly on the bonus content on this six disc set. Discs one through five contain the twenty episodes of season three: disc six is filled with a larger collection of featurettes, commentary, and more than was ever included in the Season One and Two sets.
In fact, this is the first time we have commentary at all, provided by Rob Thomas, Creator and Executive Producer, and Dan Etheridge, Supervising Producer. Rather than offering it as an alternative sound track overlaid on the individual episodes, it’s given as small featurettes, in the section Going Undercover with Rob Thomas.
Divided into featurettes based on topics (such as Rob’s Directing Experience, Favorite Guest Star Moments, and The Politics of Veronica Mars), Rob and Dan talk mostly about experiences and decisions from the Third Season. They do, however, dip back occasionally to Seasons One and Two where appropriate to give more back story behind their stories. Considering this is the first Season’s DVD’s that have had commentary, that was nice to see. They aren’t afraid to shed an unfavorable light on themselves, either. In the section titled Do-Overs?, Rob and Dan show and discuss some scenes that made it to air that they weren’t happy with for one reason or another.
Unaired Scenes are offered with introductions by Rob Thomas explaining why they didn’t make it to the aired version of the show. In most cases they were cut for time, of course. There were occasions where he had a difficult choice to make, however, and he tells us why, perhaps, one scene was kept in preference over another.
Ultimately, however, the best - and most poignant - bonus features on these discs for any of us fans have to be the Season 4 Presentation and Pitching Season 4. Here, at last, we see the direction that the series could have taken if only the CW had been wise enough to pick it up. It’s a new Veronica, dated several years after the events of Season Three, a Veronica who has gone through the FBI Academy at Quantico and is now ready to embark on her life as a Special Agent.
There is enough of the old Veronica Mars flavor - voice overs, interactions with people around her, her snappy wit - to feel a continuity with where the show had been in the first three years. And at the same time, there’s a sense of a new, grown-up Veronica, dealing with more serious villains, but finding that even though her peers are “grown-up,” too, people still often behave in a very high-schoolish way to get what they want.
Ultimately, probably the best compliment I can pay to the bonus features on this set is this - the Season 4 pitch and background information made me long for the series to return, and the commentary by Rob Thomas made me want to go back and watch Seasons One through Three all over again.
If you’re a Veronica Mars fan, and haven’t got this set yet, I’d heartily recommend you pick it up.
Related Links:
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Order at Official Site: Veronica Mars at Warner Bros. Online Store
- Order at Amazon: Veronica Mars/Season Three on DVD
Posted: November 7th, 2007 under DVD Television.
Comments: 1
