That fraught tug-of-war would turn out to be a forerunner of the relationships that today’s shows find themselves building with their fandoms. It was always a push and pull between a fanbase that adored the show but often found itself frustrated with the direction it was going - and with a creative team that was genuinely grateful to its fans yet appeared to be growing ever more frustrated with the task of satisfying them. When I was in college, I was in love with Veronica Mars, the high school noir about a teenage private detective, and I wanted to know everything that anyone was saying about it.īut as I quickly learned, Veronica Mars’ relationship with its fandom wasn’t purely positive. I didn’t post about the show online, but I read everything I could find: the debates on Television Without Pity about whether season two was better or worse than season one, the romantic fanfiction on LiveJournal, the recaps and reviews and articles that dotted the internet. “If the ratings weren’t making us feel great, Television Without Pity was making us feel like we were doing something right.” “Because our numbers were always mediocre on Veronica Mars, it was the thing that made us feel like we were doing a good job, because there was such fervor in those postings,” Veronica Mars creator and showrunner Rob Thomas told Vox over the phone.
Veronica Mars has long had the kind of fandom that contemporary shows aim to cultivate in the age of social media, and it built that fandom on message boards like Television Without Pity and pre-MySpace social media platforms like LiveJournal. Veronica Mars fans are so passionate and so vocal that they’ve brought the show back from the dead twice now when it was in its first run, from 2004 to 2007, their volume and enthusiasm kept the show alive while its dismal ratings argued for cancellation. Veronica Mars is a show so inextricably linked to its fandom that, in some ways, to talk about the show is to talk about its fans.
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