MONDO EXTRAS

CB: Well, if they show up on our forums, you'll inspire a lot of drunken Tuesday-night posting.

RT: And when we're sitting around watching clips or watching dailies, when we hear "Veronica Mars," people in the room say "Drink!" even though we're not drinking. But we think the name sounds good.

CB: Veronica does a lot of seriously techy stuff. I mean, she's not quite Sydney Bristow, but how much research have you all had to do on surveillance and spy techniques and the like?

RT: Well, we have a PI who was on the payroll for the first thirteen episodes, and is still a consultant on the show. Now, once or twice an episode, he'll get an email from us asking something like "How would you go about getting a fake passport?" "How far will this kind of microphone transmit?" And we'll get a response back and work it into the story. One of the things we found out that would kill the show if we did it accurately is just how much they can do on the computer, because we don't want to be the show where Veronica's in front of the computer all the time.

CB: That's funny, because some people have complained that she gets as much information as she does from the computer.

RT: PIs can just do everything on the computer, but whenever possible, we try to make it fun and interesting. "Lord Of The Bling" wasn't the most popular of episodes, but the fun part for us was her having to pretend to be the hospitality host, and taking the rap group up to the room and showing them around and then bugging it. That's fun.

CB: You said in the forums that you think the show has gotten better over the first half-season. What do you perceive as having improved?

RT: We're getting better at writing the characters and knowing actors' strengths. Also, the crew keeps getting better -- we use a San Diego crew, and when you get out of L.A., the crews tend to be less experienced. But instead of shooting fifty-seven- or fifty-eight-page scripts and having to be sloppy and run long, we write forty-nine- or fifty-page scripts, and that works better all the way around, because it focuses the crew's energy on the pages that are actually going to make it into the show. Also, we've gotten enough feedback so that we know not only what we like, but what the audience responds to.