Veronica Mars' Season 4 finale backlash is what happens when a show is inextricably linked to its fandom

Vox

"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," says Constance Grady. "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 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." Grady adds: "Veronica Mars’ relationship with its fandom wasn’t purely positive. 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. 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. And nowhere was it expressed with quite as much energy as it was in the question of Veronica’s love life and whether she would ever find true happiness with her central love interest, troubled bad boy Logan Echolls."

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• Season 4 twist is an understandable way to shake up the series, but it's still detestable: "When it premiered, Veronica Mars was doing surprisingly incisive and acerbic things about class, sex, and pain from inside the relatively frothy confection known as the teen drama, not doing surprisingly hilarious things from inside a dark drama about a traumatized truth hunter: If these two descriptions amount to almost the same thing, they’re not quite," says Willa Paskin. "You put the emphasis on a different syllable. As Veronica heads into middle age and future seasons, how much pain is so much that the show can still be the first thing—actually fun and dark— instead of the second—pretty fun for being so dark?"
• Veronica Mars fares better than most reboots, but it still let fans down: "Bluntly, the new season of Veronica Mars isn’t awful but there are so many wasted opportunities, obnoxious character shifts, bizarrely introduced and undeveloped plots, a boring and needlessly complicated mystery and an approach to race that is offensive at worst and questionable at best," says Pilot Viruet. "It is, arguably, better than the last two seasons but it’s also true that those seasons weren’t exactly great. Season 4 is a far cry from the immediacy and charm of Season 1, though there are, at least, some bright spots."
• In defense of Veronica Mars' bombshell ending: "The devastating ending leaves the show a lot of really interesting places to go"
• Veronica Mars didn't need to hit a reset button to bring Veronica into the next phase of her life
• Why is the season finale shocker so hard to get over?
• Veronica Mars never was designed to be a series about a crime-fighting couple
• The tragic finale is the most outsized statement that Veronica’s story isn’t over
• Season 4 acknowledges Veronica and Logan's toxicity before forgetting it completely
• Season 4 was particularly annoying with Hulu product placements: Would Veronica and Logan really watch Harlots?
• An appreciation of swole Logan
• Enrico Colantoni is shocked by how "nothing changed" between him and Kristen Bell after all these years