Whoo!

Veronica Mars has gotten a "full" season order. The ironic quotation marks because the CW has for inexplicable reasons chosen to order seven more episodes rather than the traditional nine.

This means that added to the initial tentative 13-episode order this year, Veronica will have a short, 20 episode third season, unless the CW decides to pony up for the last two at a later date. Still, this is good news, and kvetching too much about it feels like looking a gift horse in the mouth.

Studio 60, Friday Night Lights, now Veronica Mars. It's a suspiciously good year for shows I like. Come on, ABC, make if a fab four with The Nine. The premiere of Daybreak, the second half of which was in its timeslot, was even more disappointing in the ratings than The Nine, admittedly, has been. And it didn't get The Nine's reviews.

Even weirder than shows I like getting full season orders, this year there's some kind of Lewis Carroll thing going on where the networks are showing more patience than the critics. I just did a little search of the TV weeklies and such online.

A couple of them are already giving up on new shows after only a few episodes because "they're not dotting the i's and crossing the t's." But then, the TV critics are required by their jobs to watch shows like Dancing with the flippin' Stars. To say nothing of the OJ Simpson Fox special that no one should watch on peril of their mortal soul.

I, having fewer hours of my TV-watching time spoken for, can afford to give shows time to grow. What's weird is that the networks seem to be doing that too.