It's simply not true that Veronica Mars was consistently brilliant. Season one was engaging and engrossing and at times as good as anything else on TV, but season 2 was annoying and badly plotted, the final episode shocker was insulting and deeply problematic, and season 3 was similarly lame on both political and aesthetic grounds (which is not to suggest that the two are mutually independent or separable.) Rob Thomas was all too happy to let noir be a synonym for the male gaze, and the show's treatment of rape and sexual violence got progressively worse with each passing season. Supporting characters vanished into the ether, and plotlines became increasingly vapid, predictable, or pulled out of the writers' asses for lack of more compelling stories to tell. The "LoVe" story between Veronica and her borderline psychotic spoiled brat of a sometimes lover Logan Echols went from complicated, precarious, and smartly written, to lazy, faux-epic, and trite. So I'd be much more disturbed about the cancellation if the show I liked hadn't, for all intents and purposes, ended two years ago. One reads complaints on the internets about how the CW is replacing VM with a show starring the guy who played Oliver in what was certainly the worst story arc of the OC, but if season 4 was going to be of the same quality as seasons 2 and 3, I'm not sure it would have been worth making anyway. Thank god for The Wire.