Monthly Archive for March, 2007

Strange things happen to time when you’re reading a book. It moves more slowly, and yet passes more quickly. When you read a good novel and let your imagination roam free the experience is different than working, or watching television, or being otherwise marooned in realtime. Like dreaming, reading is an important escape, a time to reflect and reorganize the jumble inside your head. For me, at least, reading a good book leaves me feeling awed and inspired and refreshed. And so it is so odd that I find myself so easily forgetting to read, or forgetting how to, or forgetting what it is like. I spend my day in front of a screen covered in words, manipulating those words to create new words, modifying those new words to create shapes and colors and more words, words that can be sorted and searched and categorized, all electronically, always dancing from place to place. All day, with the words, but it isn’t the same. The words mean something different when they are dancing.

It is important. Important to remember the difference in the words, the difference between the words that dance and the words that sit still. Important to remember that dancing is something we do every day, but sometimes we must rest, slow time, read the words that stay still on the page. Let them dance, instead, inside of our heads, where time has a different meaning, where the dance is to a more subtle and beautiful song.

Every episode of Veronica Mars disappoints me more than the last. Not because they are bad episodes, but because then could be great episodes. Mistakes were made in season one, but regardless it was amazing and excellent television, brilliant executed, emotionally engaging and well-plotted, a neatly wrapped up novel-like story with all the trimmings. And every disjointed episode thereafter has made me like the show just a bit less.

I would love, love for Mars to turn itself around, but season three is nearing a close and while there have been signs of greatness poking through, none of them have stuck, and the consensus on the boards I read is that most people don’t really expect the show to be around for another season. I can’t point to any one thing that makes us all so unhappy — except perhaps a showrunner who seems to be at least a bit out of touch — but continue to pile on minor disappointments one after another and you’ll slowly wear a man down. At best, on balance, I think Mars has hit neutral buoyancy — its good enough that I want to watch each week, but its problematic enough that each week I finish the episode, sit down for a few minutes to think about it, and invariable start picking it all apart.

In a sad way I’m almost glad that the CW may be putting this show out of is misery. Because there are plenty of people making plenty of average television shows, and, for my money, if you’re not going to strive to be great in what you do each and every day, you might as well not even bother to show up.