By Rowan Kaiser

I must admit that I have some wariness about talking about the better female characters of the past for the purposes of laying the groundwork for female characters to compete with the masculine anti-heroes who dominated discussion of “quality television.” It’s not that I don’t want there to be more, better women in important roles on television, but instead that I don’t think female characters have lagged all that far behind men on the best shows of recent years.

However, I do think that the way we define “quality television” indicates a bias that leads towards critics thinking that those masculinity-examining shows are the best. They’re all serious dramas, they’re all on cable, and they’re all (with the exception, perhaps, of The Sopranos) in more traditionally acceptable genres. If we expand out definition of quality to include shows with strong comic elements, shows that aired on networks or netlets, and shows occur in less highbrow settings, things look a lot different. Generally speaking, we can many more fantastic, quality televisions series that feature stronger women than The Wire, etc. Specifically, that criteria opens the door for Veronica Mars to be considered one of the great series of television.

After all, Veronica Mars aired on UPN, a network not historically known for its critical acclaim. It balanced drama with humor, with plenty of quipping as well as some ridiculous premises. And it was about a private investigator who worked in a high school, navigating social strata and relationship drama. It’s also one of the most intelligent shows I’ve ever seen, with one of the strongest protagonists, male or female, in television history.

Three things make Veronica Mars a stellar character: she’s strong enough to be respected, she’s vulnerable enough to be human, and she’s played marvelously by Kristen Bell. Certainly, the show’s writing and supporting cast add to it, but it’s Veronica’s show, even beyond what you might expect from her name adorning the title.
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I think we’re going to see a lot more advertising like this trailer for House of Lies, which describes a management consulting firm run by Don Cheadle, Veronica Mars, and Jean-Ralphio by telling us that “They’re the one percent, sticking it to the one percent”:

The 99 percent/1 percent dichotomy is valuable, in art as in politics, because it’s clarifying. Labeling someone a member of the 1 percent is suddenly an easy way to tag them as a villain. The term doesn’t just imply wealth—after all, we have a lot of culture that suggests the benevolence of wealth, the rich are using their money to stock Batman’s arsenal or having revelations and giving it away—it implies a kind of inherent callousness. The messaging of the political movement suggests that the 1 percent will run roughshod over the rest of America, so it’s not that much of a leap to believe they’d turn on each other. It’s that assumption—without the labeling—that’s at the core of Revenge, in which only immense wealth lets Amanda take revenge on all of the classes of society, from investors, to social climbers, to politicians, who framed her father—and did wrong by the rest of us. And it’s interesting to see the circle of 1 Percent villains widen out in House of Lies from the investment bankers of Margin Call and the wealth of Tower Heist to management consultants, a profession that’s quite efficiently captured a large chunk of elite college graduates, in part by selling the idea that you can become a member of the 1 percent by gaining skills you’ll later use to do good for the 99 percent.

Asserting that you’re a member of the 99 percent is less obviously indicative—there is a lot of difference between being in the bottom 1 percent and being just below that 1 percent—but asserting membership in the 99 percent is shorthand way of asserting a worldview and a set of priorities. That kind of affinity is powerful, so it’s not remotely surprising to see folks like Jay-Z try to bandwagon it, with Rocawear’s quickly-pulled Occupy Wall Street t-shirts, which the mogul planned to use to capitalize on a trend without, of course, contributing anything to it.