Comic Con Day 2 wrapped up with Kristen going all over the place for The Good Place. I’ve updated the gallery with photos from the panel, press line & portrait sessions.

Hey everyone!

Yesterday was a busy day and we expect nothing less from the coverage that’s going to come out of The Good Place media team today! But first, Veronica Mars! It’s been an amazing time yesterday seeing the cast promoting the upcoming season that dropped yesterday as opposed to it’s scheduled release next week!

We’re going to remain spoilers free for another 2 weeks before posting the stills and screencaptures from the new season, till then, enjoy the photo and video coverage from yesterday below.

The EW Broadcast and Team Coco videos are under the cut.

Read More

Veronica and Keith launch their investigation. Their involvement puts Police Chief Langdon on edge. Penn goes public with his theory on who the bomber is. Meanwhile, local teen Matty Ross begins her own search for her father’s killer.

 

Four Hollywood actors had a big idea: Launch a snack bar and use the sales to help feed malnourished kids around the world. They had a big name, This Bar Saves Lives, for their company. And as they sat around their office — which was really just one of their condos — in the early days of the business, they dreamed up their biggest possible goals and wrote them on a chalkboard.

“We brainstormed what success, on the business side, would look like. I’m not talking about growth trajectory or EBITDA here — I’m talking about wild indicators that would mean we’d made it,” says Ryan Devlin, one of the company’s cofounders. They wrote down three things: (1) Bars in the White House; (2) Bars in space; (3) Bars in Starbucks.

They’re still working on the first two. But with a little gumption, the third proved attainable — and would force the company to rethink exactly what it is and who should even lead it.

This is often how it goes with mission-driven businesses. Their founders start with full hearts and eager plans, but not necessarily a full grasp on what it takes to scale their ambitions. Devlin admits it himself, and even sees it as a good thing. “We are a mission with a company, not a company with a mission,” he says. But regardless of whether a socially minded company is run by famous actors or obscure do-gooders, the reality of running a business will eventually take hold. And it would for This Bar Saves Lives, too.

But first: goal #3. Bars in Starbucks.

This Bar Saves Lives’ most famous cofounder is Kristen Bell, and as it turns out, she’s good at digging up email addresses. “You make weird contacts in this business,” she says. She found the email of Starbucks’ then-CEO, Howard Schultz, lurking in her inbox and wrote him: “I have a project you might be interested in, because I know [Starbucks’] values.” Schultz replied. A meeting was set up, and Bell and Devlin hopped on a plane to Seattle…though they weren’t entirely sure what they’d do when they arrived. Neither of them had pitched a product like this before.

But they did have one experience to fall back on. “We’re both actors,” she says. “We just acted like we had this job our whole lives. We’re really good in a room. And some of our charm comes from saying, ‘Feel free to give us advice.’ We went in with an open mind and open ears.”

Does it help having the likes of Kristen Bell on your team? Surely. But still, Starbucks gave the fledgling company the smallest of tests; it put the bars in its stores in two cities to see how they’d perform. Sales were promising. So Starbucks expanded the test, and expanded again until This Bar Saves Lives products were in every Starbucks in America.

“We were making incredible strides, but it was so messy,” Devlin says. “We were just growing. There wasn’t a focused strategy.”

And there it is: The do-good initiative had reached a wall. Now it was time to really build a business. [More at Source]

When we last saw Veronica Mars, the greatest private investigator Southern California has ever birthed and tanned — shut it, Philip Marlowe — she had ducked a corporate law job and returned to Neptune, her beachside hometown, resolved to defend the weak, defy the powerful, wisecrack with the best of them. Happily ever after, on her terms.

But why be happy when you can be hard-boiled? As Veronica’s inventor Rob Thomas said, “Happy and noir don’t go well together.”

“Veronica Mars,” a snappy, sophisticated crime drama about a high school P.I., debuted in 2004 and ran for three critically celebrated but lightly watched seasons, first on UPN and then on CW, returning in 2014 for a fan-funded movie.

That seemed to be the end of it. Its star, Kristen Bell, continued a successful film and TV career. Thomas went on to create and run “iZOMBIE.” But you know the noir trope where a character thinks she has outrun her past and then the past comes on at a sprint? It applies.

In a genre-appropriate twist, the show is back, revamped for the streaming age. An eight-episode fourth season will drop on July 26 at Hulu, where the first three seasons are already available.

Reboots and revivals are as thick on the ground as Neptune beachgoers. A long-gone show that returns after so many years with its original cast, led by Bell’s Veronica, and its distinguishing style (think Dashiell Hammett after a few blender drinks) mostly intact? That’s rarer, and not without its dangers.

Continuing a beloved series after so many years risks tarnishing its legacy. (If we’re being honest, the uneven third season was risk enough.) Besides, how do you make a show about a child prodigy when that child prodigy can apply for a fixed-rate mortgage?

The season’s big mystery, according to Thomas: Is a 30-something Veronica Mars “an interesting enough character on her own to continue to attract fans?”

A few weeks ago, I met Bell on a gloomy June afternoon in her trailer on the Universal lot, an overheated box befrilled in demoralizing beige. She was in the middle of a shoot for her other show, “The Good Place,” and had two caffeinated drinks going, which partly explained the pep. (The messianic zeal she feels for Veronica explained the rest.) In her costume, a lilac sweater over an embroidered blouse and green chinos, she looked about as noir as an Easter basket.

And yet “Veronica Mars,” she said, is the show that launched her, that shaped her, that taught her comedy and responsibility and a commitment to social justice. She will quit it, she said, when everyone in Neptune is dead.

“That’s when I’ll do it,” she said, pushing her cane-sugar soprano into a lower register. “That’s when I will let her go: When the last body is buried.”

“Veronica Mars,” which The Times described, on a list of the 20 best TV dramas since “The Sopranos,” as “a peerless blend of neo-noir mystery and teenage romantic drama,” was always a show ahead of its time. Its heroine, 17 when the show began, looked like a Barbie and scrapped like a G.I. Joe. She was as quick with a comeback as with the Taser she called Mr. Sparky, but still vulnerable to problems personal and systemic.

More politically minded than your average teen soap, “Veronica Mars” had love triangles and cliffhangers and, from its first episode, a sustained interest in wealth inequality. In its depiction of gendered violence, it anticipated much of the #MeToo conversation.

“It continually kept questions about gender inequality in view,” said Susan Berridge, a lecturer in media at the University of Stirling who has written about the series. “There were so many story lines involving sexual violence and other forms of gendered abuse that it became impossible to see these issues as one-off aberrations.” [More at Source]

We finally have some extra details about the upcoming Veronica Mars revival coming to Hulu on July 26. Check out photos and synopsis of the first episode titled Spring Break Forever is the following:

Panic spreads through Neptune when a bomb goes off during spring break. Veronica and Keith are hired by the wealthy family of one victim injured in the bombing to find out who is responsible.

Kristen had a busy few days last week with the launch of her & Dax’s website Hello Bello.

Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard are parents who believe there is no such thing as other people’s children. (Though they reserve the right to deny that when it’s diaper duty time.) They are two of hello bello’s co-founders and they started the company because they believe all babies deserve the best, which means all parents need access to affordable, premium products. To fulfill that dream, we’re making better stuff for babies, parents, and the planet – at far lower prices, made possible by partnering exclusively with Walmart.

Kristen spent the day after the Oscars in New York city on a full promotional mood as she stopped by Today, SiriusXM and a celebration by MOMs for the official launch of the product.

   
   

I’ve updated the gallery with stills & screencaptures of the last 2 episodes of The Good Place.