suitor won out". The third season introduced two new series regulars, Parker Lee and Stosh "Piz" Piznarski. Julie Gonzalo portrayed Parker, Mac's extroverted roommate and "everything that Mac is not." Piz, played by Chris Lowell, was Wallace's roommate and a music lover with his campus radio show. Piz was named after the director of the pilot, Mark Piznarski. The character gave Veronica another middle-class male friend. Thomas used the radio show as a narrative device to capture the mood of the university. Cindy "Mac" Mackenzie and Don Lamb, recurring characters in the first two seasons, were upgraded to series regulars. Mac, portrayed by Tina Majorino, was a computer expert befriended by Veronica. Lamb, portrayed by Michael Muhney, was the Balboa County Sheriff who won the office from Keith in the recall election. Production Conception Rob Thomas originally wrote Veronica Mars as a young adult novel for publishing company Simon & Schuster. Before his first television job on Dawson's Creek, Thomas sold two novel ideas. One of these was provisionally titled Untitled Rob Thomas Teen Detective Novel, which formed the series's basis. The novel had many elements similar to Veronica Mars, though the protagonist was male. Thomas's father was a vice-principal at Westlake High School near Austin, Texas, and the main character attended a "thinly disguised version" of the school. As Thomas had begun writing for film and television, he did not resume his teen detective idea for several years. Writing a novel could take months for Thomas, whereas a television script only took several weeks. Knowing that television scripts paid more, Thomas wrote the teen detective project's television version as a spec script before it became a novel. Since no studio or network had asked him to write it, and he would not get paid unless it sold, Thomas said that "it was never a very pressing project for me." Tinkering with it from time to time, Thomas wrote project notes a year before writing the television script. Most of his original ideas made it into the script, but some changed drastically. Thomas wanted to use flashbacks, and he had to shorten the timeline so that the murder could happen in a recent time. Thomas changed the gender of the protagonist because he thought a noir piece told from a female point of view would be more interesting and unique. Casting Kristen Bell was chosen to play Veronica Mars from