Rob Thomas, creator of UPN’s “Veronica Mars,” gives a lot of credit for the show’s second-season renewal, which was announced Monday, to a vocal and vociferous fan campaign, much of which was centered around several fan-run Web sites, especially saveveronicamars.com, marsinvestigations.net and televisionwithoutpity.com.
In fact, the first person–outside of the show’s cast and crew–that Thomas called with the news of the show’s renewal was the “Couch Baron,” a.k.a. John Ramos, the moderator of the “Veronica Mars” message boards at televisionwithoutpity.com.
“The people at Television Without Pity have been such huge supporters of the show–mailing letters, sending faxes, putting ads in the trade papers–I thought I owed them an early heads-up,” says Thomas, who also credits the efforts of the other fan sites too.
And though there’s some criticism on the fan message boards, Thomas enjoys the close contact with fans. “To me, it’s like the coolest focus group you can have,” he says.
As for next season on “Veronica Mars,” Thomas says he’d been kicking around another seasonlong story arc for the last couple months, but in recent days he ditched that concept in favor of something “much cooler” that he and his writing staff came up with.
And though he won’t divulge details, he will say that if guest star Alyson Hannigan’s new TV pilot doesn’t get picked up for fall, he’d love to have her back as a recurring character in Season 2.
———-
Edited by Cara DiPasquale (cdipasquale@tribune.com) and Victoria Rodriguez (vrodriguez@tribune.com)
