Veronica Mars creator Rob Thomas on the bliss of creating successful television

Life in TV hasn't always been wine and roses for Rob Thomas. Many times he's been worried the next call was going to be from the studio cancelling the show he was working on. And he's been on shows when he has been begging for that call.

"It's been like, please call and put us out of our misery. I'm miserable, I know the show isn't good, I know you guys don't like it, please just let me stop coming to work each day doing something no one is happy with."

Best known as the creator of Veronica Mars, but also a producer, director and novelist, Thomas says it's a minor miracle anything good makes it through the system. "When you create a show, you write a pilot, you hire a crew, you hire a cast. The writers kind of rule TV so I get to hire the director who's going to shoot my project. There are probably a hundred decisions and if you get three wrong the whole thing goes south so quickly."

Thomas, who is speaking at the opening night of the Melbourne Writers Festival on August 21, started work in TV almost 20 years ago and reckons the big change that has driven the improvement in quality has been the expansion in outlets. When there were four networks in the US, all they wanted was a huge audience so shows had to be "big-tent shows".

"The great thing now is there are so many outlets doing original programming that you can write a show that [he laughs] only 2-3 million people are going to watch and that's fine."

Veronica Mars, his series about a teenage private investigator, aired for three years from 2004. "We were a pretty low-rated show but it had a really devoted cult audience. A lot of people discovered it after we were gone."

Unlike other girl-power characters such as Buffy who were "kick-ass females, they could beat you up", Veronica's appeal was largely a result of her "I will not be f---ed with" attitude. Her popularity was such that when Thomas sought crowdfunding for a film, the initial target of $US2million to ensure the film went ahead was raised in under 10 hours.

His current series, iZombie, about a medical intern who eats the brains of cadavers and temporarily absorbs their experiences that she uses as a crime fighter, has been a blissful experience and has just been renewed. "The studio, the network, and I and Diane Ruggiero, who I created the show with, have all been on the same page from day one. Usually it is a creative battle, a war that you wage," he says.

So his only looming problem is the flight from the US to Melbourne. "It could be a bit dicey," he says. That's because Saturday is his 50th birthday and he has a huge night planned at the Hole in the Wall club near his home in Austin, Texas.

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