Veronica Mars

Once popular, now a social outcast at Neptune High, Veronica works part-time for her private-investigator father and moonlights solving her classmates' problems for cash. Sharp-tongued and guarded, she's still chasing answers about her best friend's murder and the rape she survived, using wit as armor while she navigates a school stratified by obscene wealth.

Kristen Bell's voiceover does the heavy lifting: caustic, funny, wounded, never self-pitying even when the material is bleak. The show trusts a teenage girl to be genuinely competent at detection rather than merely spunky, and Bell plays the toughness as a skill she's had to build, not a personality trait she was born with.