When the CW network press sessions started Monday, surely no one expected two mentions of “The Love Boat.”

Chris Rock, who was part of a panel on the CW’s new Monday night block, wisecracked that people don’t really see him as a comic any more, they see him as a producer. So people slip him scripts.

“‘It’s “Happy Days” meets “Love Boat’ with a little bit of Cedric,’” he said, imitating one of the pitches he’s allegedly heard.

The “Love Boat” came up in the “Veronica Mars” session also: Creator Rob Thomas related a discussion that he had with Joel Silver, with whom he produces the CW drama.

For some reason, the two got onto the topic of which show they’d rather have on their credit list - “Love Boat” or the short-lived Fox show “Action.”

Thomas said Silver called him “crazy” for not wanting “Love Boat” on his resume, given how much money it had made. “It’s still making money!” he said Silver shouted.

But Thomas doesn’t want to be the producer of a show like “Profiler,” which, he joked, ran for 11 years but “I never met anyone who saw it.” Nobody ever said, he noted, “I’ve got to get home to see ‘Profiler’!”

Well, bless Rob Thomas for being the guy who would rather have the fabulous show on resume than the predictable show that had a following but little passionate devotion from TV viewers. Fingers crossed that the devotion that Thomas lavishes on his show is reflected right back at him, and shows up in the Nielsen ratings this fall

The “Veronica Mars” session was pretty much a love fest; most of the assembled critics seemd to like the show. And Thomas was open about his assessment of what the show needed to do in its third season to grab more viewers.

The note from the network, he said, was to make the show less complex, and he said he realized Season 2, though he was proud of it, was just way too complicated. Part of that was because of he introduced a complicated Logan storyline to give Kristen Bell some time off during the week.

Next year, the show will air in three chunks that won’t be interrupted by repeats or preemptions. The first block will be nine episodes long, the second will be seven episodes long and the final one will be 6 episodes long. (That’s if, God willing, “Veronica Mars” lasts that long: The series order for the show, which returns Oct. 3, is only for 13 episodes at this point).

“You won’t have long breaks where you can’t remember what happened six weeks ago,” he noted.

Some other “Veronica” news:

Most of the show’s young characters will be going to Hearst, the local university in Neptune. Tina Majorino (who plays Mac) will not be in every episode but she will be a series regular. They’re now casting two new recurring characters, “Piz,” Wallace’s roommate, and Mac will get a roomie who’s very different from her - bright and bubbly and effervescent.

“She’s everything that Mac is not,” Thomas said. “She listens to a lot of Nelly Furtado in the room. But they hit it off and [the roommate] has a heart of gold.”

Keith Mars will still be a big part of the show because Veronica’s going to live at home and still help her dad out with his detective agency.

It doesn’t sound like there was any other major news, aside from Dick Casablancas getting into Hearst (that will be explained, Thomas said). And Charisma Carpenter will be back at the start of the season. They tried to book Stephen King, a fan, as a Hearst professor, but he was booked solid at the time they needed him, but he asked Thomas to keep him in mind for future cameos.

(By way, I spoke to Alyson Hannigan at the CBS party on Saturday and she said she’d be happy to return to “Veronica Mars” but no guest spots have been booked for her on the show at the moment.)

The instructions he continues to give his writing staff, Thomas said, is keep the show’s heroine compellingly prickly — to “write [Veronica] like a porcupine.”

Thomas, in a serious moment, said it was “make or break time” for the show. “If we come on this network and bomb, we might be gone in four episodes.”

Let’s hope that doesn’t happen. No doubt fans are already dissecting Thomas’ remarks on TelevisionWithoutPity.com, by the way, which he mentioned by name when a discussion of Internet feedback came up.

Thomas said he reads the message boards in large part to see if fans are understanding the mystery, into the mystery and buying into the red herrings that the writers throw out. He also reads the boards to know if fans are giving a particular episode the “thumbs up or thumbs down, but generally I know that long before I read” what fans are thinking.

Some other tidbits from chatting with Rob Thomas, along with several other reporters, at the CW party on Monday night. There are some spoilers, so you know the deal, don’t read ‘em if you don’t want to know:

* Lewis Black will probably be guesting on the show as a college professor who does experiments regarding prisoner abuse. Logan and Wallace, who are taking the class, take part in the experiments because their other option is to write a long essay, and they don’t want to do that.

* The second-season DVD comes out Aug. 22. This one will be, like last season’s, a bare bones affair released in a rush to get it out there before the show returns.

* In episode three, we’ll see Weevil again, he’ll just have gotten out of prison, but not for what he did to the guy who died in the stadium blast. He’s working at a car wash as a mandated post-prison job and he eventually loses his job and he needs Veronica’s help. And not surprisingly, he ends up with a job a Hearst.

* They’re trying to get Patty Hearst, who said she loves the show, on “Veronica Mars” as - get this - a board member at Hearst College. And I don’t know if Thomas was joking or not, but he said they’d actually discussed a story idea - what if Hearst got kidnapped?

* As far as Veronica’s transformation as a high school girl, Thomas said, “she’ll have to lose some of that outsider baggage. Whereas Neptune High School was very rigidly divided [along class lines] ... that chip on her shoulder will be lessened. There will be other interesting social situations we can put her in.”

* The first ongoing-mystery arc is about the rapist at Hearst College. In the second episode of the season, one of the girls who was raped, it turns out the night she was raped she went to a sorority rush party. So Veronica goes undercover during sorority rush. “So we’ll still have situations where she’ll feel out of place.”

* Thomas wants to bring back Alia Shawkat and Michael Cera from “Arrested Development,” but nothing is definite yet and Cera booked a movie, but they still hope they can bring both actors back (especially Alia for around episodes 5,6 and/or 7).

* He wouldn’t say much about the other two mysteries of the season (each episode will also have a standalone story), but he said that the three will have “decidedly different feels.”

* The second mystery was largely inspired by Steven Soderbergh’s “Bubble.” “All the creative energy [for that movie] felt like it went into the setup and motives,” Thomas said. “The nice thing is, the second mystery, we’ve got these first nine episodes to lay in” the groundwork of what happens in arc two.

* Elaborating on the balance between weekly stories and ongoing story arcs, Thomas said: “This is a strange note to get from a network but [they said to] not worry about the casual viewer [with ongoing plots]. So with this serial rapist [plot], we’ll put those beats into each episode like we always do, but we’re not going to put any effort into [explaining the history of that story too much]. If you haven’t seen it, and you’re not up to date on it, we’re not catching you up. It’s for fans who are watching every week. So that extra space we have, we’re going to dial up the mystery of the week. [The network is saying] ‘Give us that one thing we can put on the air [and promote],’ i.e., ‘Veronica’s going undercover at a sorority.’ That’s the thing that they can put in their promos. And they can sell the mystery of the week now, rather than the big overarching mystery.”