It’s hard to write about TV series. Professional critics are usually sent review tapes of the first three episodes in advance, which presents them with a clear-cut task they may perform in good conscience. I am starting to suspect however that many shows try to win praise and publicity with good writing initially and then afterwards shift to titillation in order to boost the numbers, a scenario in which criticism functions like a corrupt union that needs to be paid off up front with “quality” before construction can start. Believe it or not, One Tree Hill and Smallville actually started out pretty good before degenerating into soft-porn soaps where everyone eventually hooks up with everyone else. Judging by the commercials, Lex Luthor’s on top of Lana Lang these days — how wrong is that? The O.C. lasted a little longer before going down that road, but down it too went.

A second option for a critic would be to wait for the entire season to come out on DVD, which gives you on hand a pristine but rather large and unwieldy text and in the end only displaces the problem of the variable quality of episodes onto that of seasons. There’s still a leap being made, a gap between a good season and an overall Good Show that could only be closed by dealing strictly in retrospect with series that are now finished like “The Prisoner” or “The Singing Detective.” But a turn to the classics would result in missing the whole excitement of television in the first place, the feeling of being part of it while it’s fresh and current. (That, and the fact it’s free.)

Thus the TV critic is compelled by the medium itself to be something of a hack, generalizing from incomplete knowledge. To take the point even further, any episode is itself made up of two or three distinct stories, often targeted at different audiences, so after seeing one steamed-up storyline and one that veers toward the sentimental intertwined like on Grey's Anatomy, it is hard to fairly judge if even a single episode was actually good as a whole.

In short, television is very uneven. I used to believe myself the victim of something I called the Gilmore Curse, which was that whenever I told a friend of mine that Gilmore Girls was a great show, the next episode was absolutely terrible. Fortunately I had so little credibility that none of my friends listened to my recommendation in the first place; if they had, I would soon have had no credibility at all.

As a rule of thumb, the episodes written by Amy Sherman-Palladino herself were the good ones. This is no accident, as shows are often written by one good writer (who is called the executive producer and gets the last credit on screen) surrounded by several more or less passable apprentices and imitators, a thesis proven by the immediate and irreversible decline when the name producer leaves to start a new show, there being more money in launching shows than sticking around to run them. After every good episode there will be a bad one since the top writer can't write them all herself, and so inevitably any recommendation of mine inspired by an Amy episode would have been undercut by the subsequent non-Amy one. The system itself was working against me in ways of which I was unaware.






2.
For those of you who don’t know, Veronica Mars is a show about a girl detective who solves weekly mysteries in a California seaside town, and is currently starting its third season as a rabid fan favorite still riding low in the real-world rankings. The show had Buffy rip-off written all over it from day one but the letters soon rearranged themselves to spell out Buffy successor. Both Willow and Cordelia were brought on in supporting parts and Joss Whedon himself did an on-screen cameo as a car rental agent. Stephen King is also a big fan. (If you're considering catching up on the first two seasons on DVD, skip to section 4 of this piece to avoid “spoilers,” the existence of which is another reason it's hard to write about TV.)

The first season’s over-arching storyline was the murder of Veronica’s best friend, and the second was a bus crash that killed several of her fellow students. The new season began with Charisma Carpenter’s character getting shot and killed by her lover in a cabin out in the desert, though like anything else in the show, this could turn out to be misdirection. The series is one of those unstable houses of mirrors in which nothing is as it seems, and once you have the ending a serious cognitive effort is required to go back and reinterpret certain scenes to understand what was actually going on, since half of the mystery was actually a con either by the bad guys or in order to catch them. It usually dawns on me as I'm laying in bed waiting for sleep.

The rest of the cast has moved on to college, with two new characters brought on, Wallace’s shaggy roommate Piz, who caught a quick crush on Veronica at first whiff, and Mac’s roommate, a promiscuous blonde named Parker who at the end of the first episode fell prey to a campus rapist who shaves his victims heads as a further violation.






3.
Rape is a recurring theme of the show. A second storyline the first year involved Veronica waking up after a party to discover she had been knocked out with rohypnol and her panties were lying on the floor. I never thought I would live to see the day when a teenage detective set out to solve the mystery of her own rape. Like much of the show, it played right down the middle between empowerment and pornography. It was far beyond what is usually called “edgy”, i.e. that which makes others uncomfortable, and well into territory that made me uncomfortable myself, and not in an enjoyable way.

In a way, soft porn is more disturbing than porn because you don’t really know what it is you are watching. Real porn has a clinical aspect to it; it is quite literally educational and performs a clear function as an aid to arousal. The woman answers the door and the pizza delivery boy is there. Those unfamiliar with it believe it is a disease when in actual fact it serves as a highly effective and inexpensive treatment, inciting in order to relieve. In the big picture, it's soothing.

Overall, the series has been sexually very creepy in innumerable ways. Veronica’s best friend turned out to have been murdered by her boyfriend’s father who she was also having sex with, and the second season villain turns out to have been one of several boys molested by the current good-guy mayor. The sordid world of noir is here intensified and then made ten times more sordid by its transposition into a teen setting.

In this week’s premiere, we see Veronica in bed with her boyfriend Logan just after sweaty sex, telling him he is such a great lover he should consider going pro. This scene, one of the rare “positive” and consensual depictions of sexual love on the show, falls totally flat and like all of its non-dark moments is probably only the writers setting us up for future betrayal, Logan being the same guy who, when they were broken up last season and she was seeing someone else, coldly remarked to her in the hall that “if cuddling is the best part, he didn't do it right.”

He also greeted her by singing the Snow White song “Hi Ho, Hi Ho” to her with a nasty emphasis on the Ho. There is a conscious rewriting of images of innocence here, a deliberate perversion of predecessors. A character is named Beaver to allude to the late 50’s family comedy “Leave It To Beaver” but also to a slang term for the female genitals; his brother’s name is Dick. An episode titled “Betty and Veronica” implies the derivation of our heroine from one of the eternally paired light and dark rivals for Archie’s attention, neither of whom he ever got to second base with outside of a Tijuana Bible. Director Frank Capra’s great-grandson plays the bad boy leader of the Hispanic bikers who has one of the members of his gang killed to avenge another, and Three Men and a Baby’s Steve Guttenberg appears here in a role as a pedophile. The show likes to take the clean and make it dirty, as if to claim that whiteness is a whitewash and innocence not just a rarity or a temporary condition at best but an actual lie.






4.
Joel Silver, producer of the Die Hard, Lethal Weapon and Matrix films, is one of the executive producers of the show, and while it would be a mistake to make too much of this, I think a parallel can be drawn between the sexuality of Veronica Mars and that of Natalie Portman’s character in Silver's V for Vendetta, namely in that it doesn’t really exist.

It’s the same old game of display-and-deny but played at a higher level. Portman is pretty to the point of being painful, an optic papercut, if you will, and generally about as tender as a swift kick in the nuts. She looks like she showers in clear nail polish. Veronica is arguably in the same vein; she doesn't have the raw vulnerability Buffy did. Her famous wit is usually a mocking impersonation of cheerful stupidity, and when she flirts it is often a weak attempt at ironizing the Dumb Blonde stereotype.

These characters are played by women but mostly written by men, in a world where men often want to punish women pre-emptively because they are afraid they can't please them. It is worth noting that like the campus rape victims, Portman's head gets shaved by the producers as well, a defeminizing and dehumanizing gesture in this context.

Such a warrior woman presents a secularized version of a destroying female divinity, one who draws worship by denying common humanity and by teaching that passion is an Aztec capacity for agony rather than one of the potential ingredients of happiness. She has men wanting her while remaining elusively characterless and seeming to deny the existence of sexuality itself, which makes satisfaction not merely difficult to obtain but impossible. As the German critic Theodor Adorno put it, “sexuality is replaced by the representation of desexualized brutality and acts of violence” (Prologue to Television, p. 54). Part virtual dominatrix, part fantasy object waiting to be dominated, when Our Lady Supersoldier gets beat down a la Rambo by someone she shouldn't have trusted (because you should never trust anyone), the viewer is torn between sorrow and sadism, as if those were the only two feelings in the world, the wide earth’s two magnetic poles.

Paradoxically it is the sexiest of these figures who are the least sensual and caring in a genuine way, the most punished and punishing in turn. It is their absence of true human sexuality that makes them so sexy, but sexy only for the wrong reasons.

Beauty is a kind of laundering of lust which sometimes calms or ennobles, but the idea of perfect beauty can also be used to purify desire until nothing is left but the violence and the frustration, the bitter dregs. There’s so much violence in the world these days that the hyper-violence on TV has begun to seem realistic. The world has finally caught up with its dark mirror and we see torture on both sides of the glass. Sometimes I suspect that beneath the laughs and the new flaxen tresses, even kindly do-gooder Veronica Mars is secretly a faithful daughter of the Roman god of War, and the darkly plotted show she helms with its sickening reveals is leading us yet another step down a path which only ends when the truth about life and sex is universally agreed to be horror.