Chrissie Hynde To Provide Theme Song for Veronica Mars on Hulu

For the second time in two weeks, Veronica Mars co-creator Rob Thomas is getting personally involved in the release of a new teaser — this time by appearing on camera. In a new promotional video released on Twitter, Thomas and series star Kristen Bell celebrate World Music Day by revealing that Chrissie Hynde of The Pretenders will provide a theme song for the series when it is revived on Hulu next month. In a send-up of the iconic scene from Cameron Crowe’s Say Anything, in which Lloyd Dobbler (John Cusack) serenades Diane Court (Ione Skye) with a boombox, Thomas does the same for Bell to reveal the new theme.

A long time ago, she used to be on network TV — the trailer even makes a UPN joke — but when Veronica Mars returns in July, it will be on Hulu, where Kristen Bell and company can be a little more hard-edged and sexy. Ever since Veronica Mars (Kristen Bell) and company returned from post-cancellation limbo for a feature film in 2014, fans have been waiting for the snarky heroine’s next adventure. The wait will be over on July 26th.

In Hulu’s upcoming Veronica Mars, spring breakers are getting murdered in Neptune, thereby decimating the seaside town’s lifeblood tourist industry. After Mars Investigations is hired by the family of one of the victims to find their son’s killer, Veronica is drawn into an epic eight-episode mystery that pits the enclave’s wealthy elites, who would rather put an end to the month-long bacchanalia, against a working class that relies on the cash influx that comes with being the West Coast’s answer to Daytona Beach. That Veronica Mars will explore the class divide in Neptune should be only marginally less surprising than the fact that it has a murder involved.

Originally launched on The WB, Veronica Mars ran for three seasons and became a cult favorite. In the series, Bell played a teenage super-sleuth whose private detective father (Enrico Colantoni) was the disgraced ex-sheriff of a wealthy seaside town. Barely making ends meet, the Mars family helped the same rich people who hated them to make their problems go away, while Veronica worked to solve the murder of her best friend — the crime that led to her father being forced to step down, after he accused the wrong person.

Hulu’s Veronica Mars will launch 15 years after the original season of the show, which ran from 2004 to 2007. The Veronica Mars movie, which was paid for by Warner Bros. but only after fans put up a couple of million dollars in a crowdfunding campaign to prove there was an audience, was released ten years after the original series began. In addition to the movie and Hulu series, Veronica Mars has been continued in tie-in novels and a fourth wall-breaking webseries called Play It Again, Dick, in which Ryan Hansen (who played Dick Casablancas in the original series) tried to convince his co-stars to appear in a spinoff series centered around his character.

Veronica Mars premieres on July 26 on Hulu.