Hulu Releases Veronica Mars Trailer

A long time ago, she used to be on network TV — 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. The teaser trailer released today during Hulu’s upfront presentation feels like the Veronica Mars of old — or at least of the movie a few years back — but also features some stuff that wouldn’t have flown when it was on The CW. You can see the trailer, which sets up a story that centers on bombers trying to scare tourists away from Neptune during spring break, above.

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.

Recently, executive producer Rob Thomas talked with ComicBook.com about the differences between plotting out a season of Veronica Mars and of his current series, iZombie, the final season of which will premiere on The CW tomorrow at 8 p.m. ET/PT. While there is always some crossover when it comes to Rob Thomas and Diane Ruggiero’s casts (certain actors have come back for three shows with the pair), Thomas said that none of the iZombie leads will be popping up on Veronica Mars this season, since they were filming at the same time.

“One of the differences between doing something like Veronica Mars and iZombie is that on Veronica Mars, we try to be meticulous about the case,” Thomas told ComicBook.com. “The case is important, and doing a mystery show, we’re not trying to hide any of the clues. You see the same clues that Veronica does, so you can play the home game of solving the mystery. Doing iZombie, where Liv can have a vision at some point, we’ve often likened it to — this is too much self-congratulatory and that’s not how I mean it, but The Big Lebowski. The first time I watched The Big Lebowski, I thought, ‘I don’t get it. Who kidnapped Bunny Lebowski? How was this solved?’ I was very worried. I now have watched that movie 65 times, and I don’t watch it for who solved the case.”

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.