Lorelai Gilmore Slept With Bogart?

I'm in love. Unfortunately, as with most of the girls with whom I'm infatuated, she's either fictional or Audrey Hepburn (I'm not gay; I just know life-altering beauty when I see it). Her name is Veronica Mars, and she likes to be watched.

Now, before this piece devolves into a Chuck Klosterman-esque dissertation on fake love and the subversive misconceptions that lovelorn men allow flawless female characters to perpetuate, allow me a disclaimer. As I mournfully articulated in a previous column, I've learned the hard way that real women are both more common and more valuable than Cameron Crowe's army of quirkily endearing ingenues.

Lucky for me, Ms. Mars is as relentlessly intelligent as she is charming-the personification of television's recent transition from being the leading source of national vapidity-a status Bill O'Reilly tirelessly ensures will never be forgotten-to the home of America's most rewarding storytelling. Brains are back on the boob tube.

It all began, as most things do, with the Gilmore Girls. For those of you who missed the Esquire feature entitled, "Gilmore Girls is the Best Show on TV for Men," Gilmore Girls is the best show on TV for men. Series creator Amy Sherman-Palladino infused her lovable mother-daughter combo with the wit of Neil Simon and the female empowerment of Sex and the City (minus the pun-stuffed voice-overs and the cloyingly egocentric protagonists), the result being an hour of whip-smart repartee that escapes gimmickry by evolving with the natural ease of the characters that speak it.

In the town of Stars Hollow, in which the brunt of the show transpires, intelligence and familial bonds triumph over all. Its moral codes are as contemporary as the cultural references for which the show is known, and the relationships between the town's various eccentrics are poignantly detailed-national monuments should be erected to writing this good.

Gilmore Girls exists on an elevated intellectual plane that invites rather than condescends, and hetero men wary of enduring a conversation betwixt two fully-dressed (related) women will soon find themselves enamored not by their looks, but by their loquaciousness-though when Rory turned her Chilton uniform into a Go-Go Yubari costume, the former had an unfair advantage.

While HBO assured that television could be as bright as cinema, smaller networks like the WB have made good on that promise. UPN, for example, has delivered Veronica Mars, the best and most fiendishly addictive thing of any kind in the history of the universe.

Trapped in a financially divided and racially resplendent LA suburb, Veronica operates as Nancy Drew and Lorelai Gilmore's lovechild might had she been raised by Sam Spiegel. While Veronica's actual father may not speak from Bogey's gravel-lined throat, he is the Danny Tanner of public investigators, and his daughter wants in on the family business.

Veronica is a gumshoe so jaded that her world is tinted green, and her high school classmates employ her sleuthing skills to unravel the weekly mysteries of their perpetually scandal-ridden lives. Cases range from tracing a freshman's bizarre lineage to demystifying a rich boy's choice to take up with a cult, and they always feed into a season-spanning murder-mystery that manages to remain involving and rewarding over the course of 22 episodes.

Veronica is endearingly brilliant without ever becoming infallible, but it's the supporting cast who summons her wit.

Enlivened by a bizarrely diverse roster (Paris Hilton and Frank Capra's great-grandson squared off in an early episode), the show has the good sense to promote the favorites and exile the boring-usually to Mexico. But at the end of the day, one rule guides the writer's pen: the smart endure and the stupid are mocked. Never has clever seemed so cool, and series creator, Rob Thomas (not that Rob Thomas) has such a solid understanding of Veronica's world that every comeback and reveal feels as intuitive as it seems contrived.

I know the anti-pop movement is a bit tiresome, but a culture that celebrates musical mediocrity (a recent TRL repeatedly championed an "artist" because he wrote half the songs on his album) and collectively elevated Big Momma's House 2 to the top of the box office heap doesn't deserve Veronica Mars. She's a bubbly affront to mainstream entertainment, and only television could allow her to be so.

Cinematic narrators often find themselves on the fence between preserving a pleasant status quo and forcing change upon their characters, but serialization affords the best of both worlds, and Mars exploits that unique advantage to the max. The button-nosed heroine redefines her world by the minute, but the joy and mystery of even the most innocuous moments suggest that she doesn't have to.

Now begins yet another February, a month in which cinema's dead zone grows more vacuous by the day, and every trip to the movies is followed by concern for the future of our species. But somewhere between the No-Spin Zone and the refried wisdom of Dr. Phil awaits a world more interested in invoking your brain than crippling it-Lost even manages to involve monsters in the process. These dark days are enough to make any cineaste long for December, but thanks to the unprecedented variety of intelligent programming, the TV is glowing brighter than ever.

David Ehrlich is a Columbia College junior majoring in film studies.