by Emily Maesar, Associate TV Editor

Coming right off the heels of the juggernaut that was the 2003-2004 teen television season with One Tree Hill and The O.C. was the resurgence of teen shows with a certain kind of dramatic genre. Not just classic shows about teens with normal issues set in high school, like the many shows before them. No, the 2004-2005 TV season brought us the Canadian show Instant Star and UPN’s Veronica Mars.

Created by The Kids of Degrassi Street (the original series in the Degrassi universe) co-creator Linda Schuyler, Instant Star was about a teen girl who enters a music industry competition and wins, thrusting her into the titular instant stardom. When Jude Harrison (Alexz Johnson) wins the singing/songwriting competition she’s paired with producer Tom Quincy (Tim Rozon), who used to be part of a 90s boy band called Boyz Attack. Her best friend James (Kristopher Turner) thinks he’s lame, but Jude is excited to properly start her career and finds herself entangled in a business she’s much too young for.

The series follows her exploits, including the messy business of stardom, a building romantic relationship with Tom (who is in his 20s, while she’s still very much a teenager) and her partnership with James (who is clearly in love with her). And the series was a smash hit! It was broadcast in the US on The N, which had recently been rebranded from Noggin for its teen and tween programming. It was airing alongside Schuyler’s other co-creation in the Degrassi universe: Degrassi: The Next Generation. Which actually meant that she was absolutely owning the network, as Instant Star was the second most popular series on the next, coming in only after Degrassi: The Next Generation.

The series was also nominated for multiple Gemini Awards, basically what we’d consider the Canadian Emmys. It even won for Best Director for that first season. However, like many shows, Instant Star had a sharp decline in popularity as time moved on and by the end of the fourth, and final, season of the show both CTV, who produced and aired the series in Canada, and The N pulled their funding. And, unlike Veronica Mars, that is currently the end of the series. There’s no reboot planned, though star Alexz Johnson has said she’d be down to make a comeback, though she’s had a very solid career as a musician with a new album (Seasons) out last year.

The week after the September 15th premiere of Instant Star, UPN allowed us to meet Kristen Bell’s iconic Veronica Mars, the titular character of their hit new teen show. And it brought in the iconic theme song by The Dandy Warhols “We Used to Be Friends,” which is where I pulled the title for this series. And while a large part of the show takes place at the high school, Veronica Mars does a great job blending the aesthetic of the teen show, and all the emotional complications of those types of shows, with a staunch mystery. Veronica, and her father, are private eyes, after all, so Veronica Mars gets to be a serious teen noir in the modern era.

The series follows Veronica, whose father used to be the sheriff of their small, but ultra-wealthy, beach town in Southern California, Neptune. But everything changed when Veronica’s best friend Lilly Kane (Amanda Seyfried), the daughter of a tech billionaire, was killed a year ago. Keith Mars (Enrico Colantoni) was convinced that Lilly’s father killed her, but when he was proven innocent, Veronica’s father was then ousted as sheriff. Eventually, Veronica’s mother abandons them, leaving Veronica and Keith to figure out what their lives look like when half the town hates them.

Veronica Mars is made up of many mysteries, as is the case with many shows with any kind of episodic nature, however because we’re firmly in the 2000s at the point of its conception by Rob Thomas (not the musician), it’s also deeply serialized. There are three central mysteries set up in the pilot of the series, which are all compelling in their own ways. First, is Lilly’s murder. Sure, her father might not have killed her… but who did? Someone’s in prison for it, but nobody we’re following truly seems to believe it. Second, is that soon after Lilly’s murder, Veronica was roofied and raped at a rich kid party. (The answer to who raped her isn’t answered until season two and it’s a fucking doozy.) And, finally, the third mystery is what happened with Veronica’s mother. The final moments of the pilot have Veronica seeing her mother’s car at the sleazy motel she usually catches people cheating on their wives at, having not heard from her in nearly a year.

And this is the hook of the show. It’s flashy and funny, shot in a modern way (although the flashback color shift is a real 2000s choice), and it’s got good mysteries that sustained the series even when UPN and The WB merged into The CW. Creator Rob Thomas was originally a novelist and conceived of the story as a book (with a male protagonist). Once he got his first television writing job on Dawson’s Creek, however, he started thinking about things in terms of scripts. He eventually circled back on the original concept, changed some things, and wrote the pilot as a spec script.

All that work and reworking really paid off, though, because Veronica Mars is largely considered to be a cult classic and a critical success. Critics likeJames Poniewozik from Time put it down as one of the best dramas on television, praising Bell’s performance. Kay McFadden from The Seattle Times said it was, “Alias in its attitude, Raymond Chandler in its writing and The O.C. in its class-consciousness.” Veronica Mars was often called “smart”, and its cast was considered “uniformly good” by many. However, critical success doesn’t mean general success. Each season struggled with ratings compared to other teen shows on the network that only recently ended like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Roswell.

When the network merge happened, and the third season of the series aired on The CW, it would be the end of Veronica Mars—at least for now. It simply couldn’t keep up with the ratings that initial slate of shows were bringing in for the new network. However, the series lived on and became a bonafede cult classic. Bell was able to swing the cancellation into her getting the voice of Gossip Girl in the new series, and in 2013 a Kickstarter was launched to crowdfund a feature film continuation and cap to the series. Which worked. It broke a bunch of records, at the time, for its funding speed and amount it was funded by. Then, in 2019, the hype was still so high for Veronica Mars, that Hulu greenlit a fourth, much shorter than the previous seasons because of where we are in the industry, series. Not to mention that Rob Thomas finally did get to write that novel when Veronica Mars tie-in novels started to be released.

So, while Instant Star didn’t get to live on, at least one major teen show from the 2004-2005 television season did! Veronica Mars also represents the closing of the walls on a certain type of teen show based on networks. While there are elements that we’d see in later teen shows, like teacher-student relationships and older people preying on underage (mostly) girls, it’s also the first properly modern teen show with computers and phones and everything that would become a vital part of our existence in this new era. Buffy the Vampire Slayer had computers, sure, but the 1990s internet was vastly different from the mid-2000’s one.

Streaming video might have made Lilly Duncan’s murder scene viewable to the general public, but it also would be the life blood of Veronica Mars and the future of all shows going forward. The internet giveth and the internet changeth forever, after all.