Rob Thomas writes teenagers who talk faster than the adults and know more than they should, then hands them detective work. In Veronica Mars that made a first season as good as American teen television has been; the years since have been a fight to keep anything on air.
Fi1m perspective
A girl sits in a car outside a motel at night with a camera on the dashboard, waiting for somebody's husband to come out. In voiceover she tells us what she thinks of him, of the wife who hired her, and of the town. She is seventeen and has homework. That is the opening move of Veronica Mars (2004), and it is Rob Thomas's whole method in one scene: take a shape the audience already knows, the private-eye story with its liars and its stake-outs, and give it to someone the genre had never let hold it.
Thomas taught high-school journalism before he wrote for television, which may be why his teenagers sound like teenagers who have read something. He passed through the Dawson's Creek writers' room, created Cupid, which ran from 1998 to 1999, then Veronica Mars, which ran from 2004 to 2007 and came back in 2019 after a feature film in 2014 that he wrote and directed. He co-created Party Down (2009) with John Enbom, about actors working as caterers, revived in 2023, and iZombie (2015), a procedural with a longer story running under it.
What works is the plotting. In the first year of Veronica Mars, Thomas, Diane Ruggiero, Phil Klemmer and John Enbom plant small details early that pay off twenty hours later, and the murder of Lilly Kane, which the town of Neptune has decided is solved, holds a whole season of lying together. Josh Kramon's score keeps to a few guitar figures and a low pulse. Kristen Bell, for whom Thomas has now written three times, can say his lines, quicker and crueller than most writers would give a heroine, without sounding pleased with herself. Thomas has said the story began with a boy detective and "became more powerful with a female protagonist. It hurt more." We went back to the first season expecting it to have dated and found the class war between the children who own things and the children whose parents work for them still stung, because Thomas puts both halves of Neptune in the same classroom and lets nobody be comfortable there.
What works less well is what comes after. The second year of Veronica Mars is looser, and the 2019 return is colder; the writer who can plot one season cleanly cannot always plot three. We have not reviewed his other series and will not judge them here, beyond noting that two have been brought back from cancellation, which tells you how his audiences feel about him.
Start with the first season and stop when Lilly Kane's case is closed; go on knowing the years that follow are worth having and worse. He works in a medium that keeps cancelling him and keeps calling him back, and he seems to have made his peace with both.
Biography
Rob Thomas is an American screenwriter, producer, director and author. Born on 15 August 1965 in Sunnyside, Washington, he graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a BA in history. He began his career writing young adult novels, including Rats Saw God (1996), and worked as a high school journalism teacher before moving into television.
Thomas wrote episodes of Dawson's Creek and created the series Cupid (1998). He created, wrote for and directed episodes of Veronica Mars (2004), and co-created Party Down (2009). He also co-created iZombie (2015) and co-developed 90210 (2008).
Thomas directed and co-wrote the 2014 Veronica Mars film, which was funded through a record-breaking Kickstarter campaign. A fourth season of the series followed on Hulu in 2019.
