Do you like mysteries? Snarky dialogue? A hott girl with a razor-sharp wit?

Veronica Mars is 13 episodes into its junior season and it remains one of the wittiest, freshest, snarkiest entertaining shows on television. We’re here to get you caught up to speed so that we can start a weekly article about the show. So let’s head over to Neptune, California and find out what’s up with our favorite girl-sleuth since Nancy Drew, Veronica Mars.

Veronica Mars (Kristen Bell) and her father Keith (Enrico Colantoni) live in Neptune, California, a town ruled mainly by the chasm between the haves and the have-nots. Her father is a private detective and Veronica dabbles in everything from solving problems for her classmates to doing surveillance or going undercover for her father. The show begins with Veronica starting her junior year at Neptune High School and it pulls no punches throwing us right into the Big Mystery: Who Killed Lilly Kane?

Season 1 of Veronica Mars would absolutely make my Top 10 list of best television seasons. When I was prodded into downloading (bad me) the show, I started by getting a couple episodes and then ended up watching all 22 episodes over the next 2 days. It is masterfully written and methodically plotted. The season is made up of a mystery Veronica and/or Keith solve within each show (the Mystery of the Week) and progressing through solving the Big Mystery. In season 1, the Big Mystery is who killed Veronica’s best friend Lilly. And that’s really all I’m going to tell you. It’s too good to give anything away. The show’s pacing is fantastic because breadcrumbs are left in every episode, but it isn’t fully resolved until the very end of the season. If you start watching, try to avoid spoilers because episodes 21 (A Trip to the Dentist) and 22 (Leave it to Beaver) are a phenomenal two hours of television.

Season 2 suffers a little from the sophomore slump, just in terms of the fact that it isn’t quite as good as Season 1. However, Season 1 is so good that it isn’t really saying much to say Season 2 isn’t as good. It’s still a great season and there are stand-out episodes that I adore (Ain’t No Magic Mountain High Enough). Also, I have a couple friends that liked Season 2 better than Season 1, so to each one’s own. The Big Mystery of Season 2 is solving who sent a school bus full of kids careening off a cliff into the ocean. It’s not quite as personal as Season 1 for our heroine and I think that is part of the problem for the audience. It doesn’t compel you quite as well as Lilly’s murder. Still, it is a decent season of television and again, the final episode of the season is great.

So here we are in Season 3. This season is being formatted a little differently and I both love and hate it. What they’ve done is make the over-arching mystery shorter, so the first 9 episodes covered a mystery of finding the serial rapist at Hearst College, where Veronica now goes to school. That was resolved and we are currently in the middle of a 6-episode arc where Veronica and Keith are investigating who shot Dean O’Dell. Finally, I hear the last 5 episodes will be more stand-alone mysteries with over-arching character development.

This format does make it more accessible to pick up the show if you are unfamiliar with it, however I really enjoyed the season-long mysteries of Seasons 1 and 2. If you are thinking of joining up with VMars, you don’t really need to know much about the first 9 episodes of the season, they are pretty self-contained, but check them out if you have time. However, if you’d like to start watching this coming Tuesday night, here’s what’s going on with the Dean’s suicide?/murder?.

First, the Dean’s wife was having an affair with a professor at the college, Professor Landry. The Dean found out about it and the next day was found shot in the temple with a suicide note on the computer. What the audience knows that Keith and Veronica do not is that the Dean went to his wife’s hotel room to confront the two adulterers. We also know that a group of Feministas was out to get the Dean because he refused to close down the Greek system at Hearst. They were on an “egging” rampage the night he was killed and his window was egged. Finally, his wife has an ex-husband who has popped up twice and he also has a surly, black-wearing, probably cuts himself son.

That about sums it up. It’s a great show, we highly recommend it.