The CW seems to have been aggressively marketing _Veronica Mars_ as a girls show, positioning it to catch the lead-in audience from _Gilmore Girls_ and doing strange commercial tie-ins that are probably a turn off to most male (and probably many female) viewers. I hope this works for them, but I sorta wonder. You’re taking a show that’s trying to be “edgy” and “noir” and “dark” and positioning it for that elusive female bopper tween audience (or whatever). Not the choice I would have made, but for the sake of the show I hope it works and their numbers go up. Guess we’ll see when the fast national ratings come out later today. Much like _Buffy_ before it, _Veronica Mars_ has tons of critical praise and a rabid cult following, but so far has not been able to find major ratings success. That was sorta okay when they were on UPN, but now that they are on the combined CW network that is aiming to take on the majors, it won’t be enough to sustain the show.

*Update:* The fast nationals are out, and are about in line with last year’s ratings for the premiere. I could say a lot at this point about flaws in the ratings system, like how they undercount college students, but it doesn’t matter. This is not good at all for the future of one of the best shows on television.

*Update 2:* The final nationals show that retention in the target demos was fairly high and — get this — _Veronica Mars_ male 18-34 viewership numbers were up 23% over the lead-in show, _Gilmore Girls_ — despite being up against baseball! The numbers among adults 35-49 were also up a bit. Which shows that despite the CW’s targeting at the female youngsters, men and middle-agers tuned in. Yay for that! And with that crash course in Neilson ratings over, back to our regularly scheduled blog programming, whatever that is, and let us never speak of these things again. Right. 😉