The ongoing resurrection of Veronica Mars has been one of the more unlikely Hollywood success stories of 2014. The film premiered at SXSW less than a year after the announcement of the Kickstarter campaign to revive the beloved, mid-00’s cult series. Hot on the heels of the theatrical and video on demand release of the film, the first of the Veronica Mars series of detective novels, The Thousand Dollar Tan Line, hit shelves—co-written by Mars creator (and on-again, off-again Austinite) Rob Thomas and (full-time Austinite) Jennifer Graham. Graham and Thomas re-team for the next Mars novel, Mr. Kiss And Tell, in January—but in the meantime, there’s yet another triumphant return for the little series that could.
That triumphant return is a webseries called Play It Again, Dick, and it’s the most decidedly meta of the bunch: Where the film had in-jokes and a remarkable James Franco-as-himself cameo, Play It Again, Dick is all about people playing themselves—but mostly it’s about Ryan Hansen, who stars on Mars as Dick Casablancas, playing himself, as he attempts to find a way to get a spin-off series on the CW into development.
The first episode, which debuted this week on CWSeed.com, focuses mostly on what the Dick Casablancas-obsessed version of Hansen seeks to do with his character, and his attempts to convince Mars co-stars like Kristen Bell to participate. It’s not exactly essential storytelling, but, as Hansen notes in his pitch to the network, “Dick was always the dessert of Veronica Mars.” Play It Again, Dick is kind of a show about what it’d be like to eat nothing but dessert, which is fitting for a fanbase that proudly wears the name “Marshmallows.”
