Trivia / Veronica Mars

• Actor-Shared Background: At the beginning of his trial, Aaron Echolls states that he was voted People Magazines Sexiest Man Alive in 1987. The actor playing Aaron, Harry Hamlin, was voted Sexiest Man Alive in 1987.
• Breakthrough Hit: This started Rob Thomas' career as a television producer, although his book Rats Saw God started his career as a novelist.
• Cast the Runner-Up: Both Amanda Seyfried and Alona Tal auditioned to play Veronica. Both actresses went on to play key roles in the series, although one was a Posthumous Character from the beginning and the other would join her in Season 2.
• The Cast Showoff: Kristen Bell singing One Way or Another in "Clash of the Tritons".
• Dawson Casting:
  • Veronica is implied to be 17 years old at the beginning of the show. Kristen Bell was 24 when they shot the pilot. Also Teddy Dunn (Duncan) and Jason Dohring (Logan) are a couple of years older than their respective characters.
  • The unreleased season 4 pitch features in In-Universe example: Veronica now working for the FBI goes undercover as at a girl's reform school to catch a warden who is molesting the students
  • 34-year-old Charisma Carpenter played 25-year-old Kendall Casablancas. Keith eventually finds out that she's impersonating someone else, meaning she's a few years older than she said she was.
  • Inverted when Veronica and Wallace visited Hearst College as a prospective college in season 2. Their college-aged tour guides are played by Michael Cera and Alia Shawkat, both of whom were still high school-aged at the time, while both Kristen Bell and Percy Daggs were in their mid-20s.
• Enforced Method Acting: Not in the show itself, but rather the show was the source of an instance of this trope - Kristen Bell found out the show was cancelled the day before shooting the scene in Forgetting Sarah Marshall where her character found out her show had been cancelled.
• Executive Meddling:
  • Besides ordering season three to have smaller arcs and stand-alone episodes, network executives forced show writer Rob Thomas to cast Paris Hilton in the show's second episode (where she at 23 played the world's oldest teenager) and rewrite the entire ending to Meg's character.
  • According to the actor playing Wallace, UPN made it clear to Rob Thomas during season one that they would never allow him to pair Wallace and Veronica up romantically, due to the network thinking no one would watch a show where the main character (who was white) was dating a black man.
  • A positive example in The Movie. During post-production, Warner Bros asked Rob Thomas to add a scene explaining why there was a class war in Neptune, which became Keith interfering in a stop-and-frisk. The studio bankrolled this scene, as well as the pre-titles recap and introduction.
• The Other Darrin:
  • Leighton Meester was one of the few original cast members unable to reprise their role, but since her character Carrie Bishop was central to the movie's plot, she was re-cast with Andrea Estella.
  • Play It Again, Dick re-introduces Duncan Kane into the franchise for the first time since Season 2, but he's no longer played by Teddy Dunn. Instead, the role is taken by Ryan Devlin, who interestingly already had a significant role in the show as the first Big Bad of Season 3.
  • As noted elsewhere, the dog playing Backup in the pilot is an entirely different breed to the one used for the rest of the series.
• Playing Against Type: Steve Guttenberg, star of many screwball comedies in The '80s, is politician Woody Goodman, who wants to radically transform Neptune and who has molested who knows how many young boys.
• Playing with Character Type: In season 4, Patton Oswalt plays another "nerdy comic relief guy" who repeatedly impedes in the investigation carried out by the main characters with his bumbling antics, is constantly trading insults with the Sitcom Archnemesis in his online group of amateur sleuths, and it's even somewhat sweet when he starts to romance one of his female friends. Until it's revealed that he's really a delusional Psychopathic Manchild who treats everything as a game, murders the Sitcom Archnemesis to frame him, and becomes a copycat Mad Bomber to undo his perceived lack of respect from the "alpha crowd" around him.
• Real-Life Relative:
  • Married-in-real-life Harry Hamlin and Lisa Rinna play Logan Echolls's parents.
  • Wallace's little brother who appears in a couple of episodes is played by Percy Daggs' real brother.
  • Dax Shepard (Kristen Bell's husband) makes a cameo in the movie.
• Real Song Theme Tune: "We Used to be Friends" by The Dandy Warhols.
• Sending Stuff to Save the Show: The fandom tried to convince The CW to not cancel the show by sending in thousands of Mars Bars. Before that, they copied an episode and sent UPN executives dollar bills reading "Veronica Mars is smarter than me" so they would still renew. But of course the fans still played a huge part in the renewal as the movie was crowdfunded.
• Shrug of God: Rob Thomas says that Kendall Casablancas is dead.....until someone gives a good enough story to convince him that she's still alive.
• Stunt Casting: Paris Hilton in season one, Alyson Hannigan in season one (and two, along with Charisma Carpenter). Paul Rudd appeared in season three.
• Technology Marches On: The Marses make use of then cutting-edge technology like laptop cameras, complete with full explanations of them which feel pretty weird now.
• Uncanceled: Twice. First in 2013 with a feature film through a Kickstarter campaign, released seven years after the then-final episode, and then a Hulu-ordered fourth season released five years after that.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The death of Meg Manning: She was supposed to have died in the bus crash, but UPN demanded at least one survivor due to them not wanting to open the show's second season with a bunch of dead teenagers. So Meg (who was supposed to die) lingered in a coma with the plan being that Meg's mother would euthanise her possibly braindead daughter and Veronica (hiding in the room) would witness this and be busted by hospital staff members, after Meg was smothered to death when she comes out of hiding and removes the pillow from Meg's face. This got shot down too (though Thomas was allowed to film it as part of a stunt "alternate ending" that was posted on the show's UPN website). So instead, the episode that aired ended instead with the reveal that Meg was pregnant with Duncan's baby and her waking up just in time to give birth and die from a brain hemorrhage, which also allowed Teddy Dunn to leave the show
  • Dick was supposed to be a suspect for the Hearst Rapist storyline and Rob Thomas even admitted that they had a retcon in mind to establish Dick secretly being on campus during the season two episode that started the arc, this was abandoned.
    • The rapist was going to be Dean the tour guide, until Michael Cera was unable to return.
  • Season Four was supposed to have been a complete Retool, complete with Time Skip and firing all cast members save for Kristen Bell. The relaunch would make Veronica an FBI Agent, going on undercover assignments with a new milquetoast boyfriend agent and Walton Goggins as her supervisor/mentor.
  • The reason Wallace and Mac were so underutilized in season 3 is that there was supposed to be a third major mystery plot revolving around them. When the episode order was cut to 20, there was no way it could be squeezed into that time, so we're left with these two major characters getting barely anything to do for no reason.
  • Mac was supposed to be in Season 4, however her actress was unsatisfied with what would've have been Mac's diminished role in the story, despite her being an employee of Mars Investigation and ultimately concluded that Mac appearing would just be superfluous, so she opted not to participate.
• You Look Familiar - the same person played Lucky in season 2, and Tim Foyle in season 3.

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