I like smart TV, and I like arc-story telling. Really, it’s no surprise that Veronica Mars is a favorite of mine. Admittedly, and I’ll say this up front, the third season was pretty blech.

So I was surfing Facebook today when I saw someone make an offhand reference to a Veronica Mars movie. A quick Google turned up this article from last August, which seems to make it at least a possibility (even a slim one). Frankly, though, I don’t think it would work — or at least, I’m not certain that it would. VM’s strength came not from the stand-alone episodes of the third-season, or the in-episode mysteries of the first two seasons: rather, it came from the dropping of clues, and the building character relationships leading from the “Big Mystery” from the start of the season to the end.

In a lot of ways, I found the show to be the cultural successor to Buffy The Vampire Slayer and, yes, I know that seems like a stretch — one’s a show about a chick killing vampires, and the other is about a chick solving mysteries in her high school. But when you compare Buffy and Veronica, and ignore the fact that they’re both small, cute, blonde girls (Kristen Bell‘s cuter), and look instead at the quick-fire banter, my point is made.

I would love to see Veronica Mars back on television. I think the show’s cancellation was a mistake, although I wasn’t confident the series could work as “Veronica Mars, FBI” as it was pitched for its fourth season. There’s something else VM and BTVS had in common: they were great shows, but only when set among the relative innocence of high school — when the characters moved to the “real world”, the shows went down. I have a theory on this, and it involves, of all shows, Saved By The Bell.

So, we all know Saved By The Bell. It was a live-action cartoon with 2-D characters making the motions through mediocre scripts and brightly-colored scripts. After NBC had dragged the show on and on, they decided the three male leads could survive a college-set spin-off aired during their evening schedule. And the show failed: I mean, it was just awful, but that’s what happens when you take Zach Morris, who used to break the fourth-wall regularly, who once used a “time out” to freeze AC Slater mid-punch and arrange for his nemesis to strike Mr. Belding instead, and you put him in a show where he suddenly can’t make time-outs, and the consequences are suddenly far more real than a detention or lecture from his parents.

Now, admittedly, that’s an extreme example, but I think the broad-strokes apply. Veronica Mars was a show with a lot of heart, but it was also a show about the outsider and the outcasts against the insiders and the populars, and it was a show about a father and daughter. I don’t really see Veronica Mars, FBI Agent, living at home with her dad, but that might just be me. And in the same way that I didn’t like Veronica Mars as a college student, and just as I can’t picture her as an FBI agent, I just can’t see her on the big screen.