From the anti-’O.C.’

When she moved to Los Angeles in 2003, Kristen Bell used to stare at the celebrities she saw in the mall. On a recent weekday morning, the customers in a Studio City Starbucks a few blocks from her home scrutinized her with the same sort of puzzled look, trying to figure out where they might have seen that delicate, collectors’ doll face with the jeans-and-T-shirt attitude.

“I’m still under the radar,” said Bell, 24, known mostly as the star of the sleeper hit “Veronica Mars,” UPN’s spunky father-daughter detective show. “ ‘Are you a friend of my sister or are you an actress?’ That’s what I get.”

She understands why fans feel they know her. Her character, a witty, jaded and vulnerable 17-year-old, has been through the 21st century high school social wringer, and she’s done it on a show that offers more wit and style than the usual run of teen TV drama. In its first season, “Veronica Mars” has found an original path: somewhere between the glammed-up melodrama of “The O.C.” and “Degrassi: The Next Generation,” the earnest Canadian show on The N that is wildly popular with teens but holds little appeal for grown-ups.

Like the best young adult literature, “Veronica Mars” explores the dark side of growing up and is willing to have a surprisingly jaded worldview -- and not simply to pander to adult interests. It’s the world through the eyes of a brainy Nancy Drew who’s been around the block. Teen sexuality, for example, is not exploited for its titillation value but rather woven into the show as a fact of high school life -- albeit an explosive one.

“Our show doesn’t tell the high school tale of the most popular girl,” Bell said. “The bottom line is, girls do get date-raped, you do get dumped by your boyfriend, your mom does leave you, and you are raised in a single-parent home, and you do experience loss at a young age,” she added, referring to the murder of Veronica’s best friend. Even a teacher falsely accused of sexual harassment can still be guilty of getting another student pregnant. “These things do happen,” Bell said.

“The thing about Veronica Mars, as opposed to ‘Buffy’ or ‘Alias,’ ” said the show’s creator, Rob Thomas, “is that Veronica ... doesn’t fight or kill. She has to outwit people.”

For the show to succeed on a small network like UPN, which is able to do only minimal publicity, its star has had to convey an out-of-the-ordinary intensity while being convincing as a normal girl. With an extensive background in theater, the Detroit-born Bell seems a throwback to an era when starlets had more going for them than willowy glamour. “She has pretty fantastic comedic timing,” Thomas said. “And you buy that she’s clever.”

One reason she has gone further faster than most pretty blonds knocking at Hollywood’s door is that she can grab roles with more than a single note. She was a murdered con artist in HBO’s “Deadwood,” the kidnapped daughter of the president in the David Mamet film “Spartan,” a drug addict’s daughter in Lifetime’s “Gracie’s Choice” and -- as a 5-foot-1 classically trained soprano -- a 13-year-old girl in Los Angeles Opera’s “A Little Night Music.” In April, Bell will be seen again on Showtime’s version of the musical cult favorite “Reefer Madness,” reprising the role of Mary Lane, a “vomitously perky” teen turned leather-clad vixen, which she played off Broadway in 2001. She has an upcoming indie film, “Fifty Pills,” and is considering more film roles.

A life in the theater

Bell, the only child of a nurse and a television news director who divorced when she was 1, said her own drive pushed her through a childhood of acting and singing lessons and community theater. When she was 16, she and her mother came to Los Angeles to meet with agents and go on auditions. “But when it came to the point where they were saying, ‘You can be on a series, you can get on “Step by Step” or “Home Improvement” ’ or whatever, I talked it over with my mom and said, ‘I don’t want to miss my high school career,’ ” she said. “It was one of the best decisions I ever made.” They went back to Detroit.

The next call came when she was 22 and establishing herself as a stage actor and student in New York. Friends she’d made while working on “Reefer Madness” -- director Andy Fickman, writer Kevin Murphy (“Desperate Housewives”) and producer-composer Dan Studney -- had returned to Los Angeles to make the film version for Showtime and asked her to join them.

“They said, ‘You have to come here. Give it a try.’ I finally said, ‘OK, I’ll trust you guys’ and moved out here. I lived on Kevin Murphy’s couch for six months when I first moved out here.... Andy made me feel like I had a family out here. That’s the reason I stayed. I really owe my career to him.”

Thomas, a former high school teacher who has written five young adult novels, said he feels lucky that Bell wasn’t better known when she auditioned. “If she were a hotter commodity, maybe she wouldn’t have done a UPN show. We couldn’t have gotten her to forsake a movie career.”

Now, he said, “it’s almost impossible to hear Veronica Mars in any other voice than Kristen’s.

“As we watch the dailies, we commonly refer to her as ‘money.’ She’s always money. Of course the other aspect of that is the potential that she will end up making us both a lot of money.”

Bell signed a five-year contract to stay with the show, in which Thomas says Veronica will be allowed to age naturally, going to college or maybe working in law enforcement or opening up her own private detective agency. Though she loves “Veronica,” Bell says she hadn’t realized how much work is required to help build an audience for a show on a small network like UPN.

As she bounces from the “Veronica” set in San Diego to publicity shoots to interviews, meetings and auditions on a few hours’ sleep a night, Bell has little time to spend with her boyfriend, producer and swim coach Kevin Mann, and the two rescue dogs with whom they share their home.

“I’m glad I did this when I was 24,” she said . “I’m in a very, very good place that hundreds of thousands of actresses wish they were in. Although my schedule is grueling, I have to realize how badly I wanted it -- and now I have it, and how am I going to deal with it?”