A Long Time Ago

Tonight is the season premiere of Veronica Mars on the merger-born new CW network. It's not the best show on television, but it's pretty darn close. It's also, by most accounts, at imminent risk of being canceled. The network only ordered half a season, so if ratings for these early episodes don't show improvement, it'll almost certainly get the ax. The good news is that it's considerably more accessible that, say, The Wire and I'm fairly certain a person could just watch and enjoy tonight's episode without fully understanding the backstory. I myself just started watching it in the middle of season two before backtracking on DVD to the beginning of season one.

Nominally, the show's about Veronica Mars, teen detective, and her father, a former sherrif now working as a private eye. More deeply, though, it's about the class struggle in America -- one of the few elements of our popular culture that really deals with class per se.