The ditzy dame has been a television fixture ever since Gracie Allen did what George Burns told her to do: "Say good night, Gracie."

"Good night, Gracie."

The airhead has been updated through the years, Goldie Hawn to Suzanne Somers to Jenna Elfman to Paris Hilton.

Now a new kind of female is gaining attention without being cutesy or empty-headed. While Hollywood is preoccupied with "Mean Girls," the small screen has moved on to smart girls.

The brainy babe is gaining traction, stretching the bounds of pop culture’s female role models. Moreover, they’re equating "smart" with "sexy."

These women follow in the footsteps of "Dark Angel’s" Max Guevera and "Alias"’ Syd Bristow, but without the guns or kickboxing.

And while these smart girls can be emotionally vulnerable and romantically distressed, they are quite cerebral as they power through life.

Not for nothing does the brainy eponymous character in UPN’s "Veronica Mars" quote Alexander Pope.

"Hope springs eternal in the human breast," says Veronica (the gifted Kristen Bell), lifting her drowsy head from her high school desk.

Even half-dozing, she is able to interpret Pope for the class: "Life’s a bitch and then you die," the street-smart junior detective explains.

Veronica Mars is as hip as she is smart, equally at home quoting English literature or "The Outsiders." She’s sleepy, having been up much of the night solving crimes. This spiritual progeny of Nancy Drew by way of Raymond Chandler represents a bold trend in television’s conception of fun females: the smart loner. She’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer without a gang.

Is the climate right for television to highlight women’s brains rather than their bodies? The ratings will tell. Certainly the culture offers enough super-smart women (Condoleezza Rice, Hillary Clinton) and super-successful women (Oprah Winfrey, Madonna) that Hollywood was bound to notice.

Smart girls like Disney’s animated Kim Possible save the world between high school homework assignments. Kim’s mom is a brain surgeon, her dad is a rocket scientist, the family values smarts. No wonder Kim foils the evil and foul-breathed villain Drakken, usually while wearing low-slung cargo pants.

Sarcastic girls like UPN’s Veronica Mars solve a case a week while working to unravel a season-long murder mystery, delivering socio-economic commentary along the way. Wise-beyond-their-years girls like Kelly Osbourne’s character on ABC’s "Life As We Know It," debuting Oct. 7, help their lagging boyfriends to evolve in the midst of high-school hormonal crises. (It helps that the actress is older than her character’s years.)

"You’re not getting ’It’ if I’m not your girlfriend," Deborah (Osbourne) says during a rant to fellow photographer Jonathan (Chris Lowell). "Is it because I’m fat? You need to tell me by tomorrow because it’s not fair to leave me hanging. And by girlfriend I mean walking-down-the-halls, holding-hands-in-front-of-everyone girlfriend."

Young overachievers like these might aspire to the intellectual standing of Grace McCallister, Christine Lahti’s college professor character on "Jack & Bobby," who never stops reminding us that she has not one, but two doctoral degrees.

Granted, television always has had its smart females. Eve Arden of "Our Miss Brooks" was the 1950s pioneer, playing a witty high school English teacher. Shirley Booth, as family maid "Hazel" in the mid-1960s, stayed a step ahead of her employer.

On the crime-fighting front, there was Diana Rigg’s Emma Peel on "The Avengers," equally at home with culture and karate chops.

Candace Bergen’s driven, well-connected newswoman "Murphy Brown" was the 1980s pacesetter and Calista Flockhart’s "Ally McBeal" was controversial as the accomplished ’90s anti-feminist icon, the lawyer in a miniskirt, a smart woman regularly defeated by her neuroses.

Kristen Bell is a direct descendant. As Veronica Mars, she punctuates the series’ action with self-aware voiceover narration, filling in the intricate backstory. Veronica was once the most popular girl in school. But her sheriff-father (Enrico Colantoni) accused the richest man in town of murder.

That didn’t sit well with the ruling class. Dad lost his job; Veronica lost her standing with the in-crowd, including her jock boyfriend; and Mom’s gone missing. Now Veronica helps out at Dad’s gumshoe agency. They get by, occasionally earning enough to "eat like the lower middle-class to which we aspire."

Rob Thomas, creator and executive producer, cited "strength, sassiness, toughness" as the characteristics he saw in Bell that made her right for the role.

Joel Silver, taking a break from big-budget explosion films as executive producer of the series, noted that "there are a lot of issues in this thing that are not what you’d expect in a normal kind of teen story. I mean, it is sophisticated."

For instance, the character relates the story of her own date-rape in the pilot, adding a painful twist to a sometimes breezy script. Veronica will go behind her father’s back to investigate the over-arching murder mystery at the heart of the story, armed with a big dog named Backup and a Taser.

"Her strength is what I admired so much because I think so many girls, their parents are divorced and they do struggle with being an outcast," Bell said. "She really deals with it. And she’s not a pushover."

The theater-trained Bell (another 20-something actor playing 17) lights up the screen in every scene. Most recently, she appeared on "Deadwood" as Flora Anderson, the youngster who came to town with her brother and was beaten to death for stealing.

Even as they provide a fresh type of heroine for viewers, these smart girls are testing old network assumptions. Conventional wisdom in TV holds that male viewers are put off by smart female characters or even by shows with girls’ names in the titles. So far, modest ratings suggest it remains an uphill battle.

"In general, television is the world of women in a way that film isn’t," film historian Jeanine Basinger said by phone. "In television we have whole channels devoted to stories about women and they’re making TV about mature women or smart girls. Buffy gets a lot of credit for this."

The result "can only be good for young women," she said.

"Over and over again in popular culture women make fools out of men, which surely represents women’s unwillingness to accept the position in which society has placed them," Basinger wrote in "A Woman’s View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women 1930-1960."

In 2004, women don’t so much make fools of men as make their own way, proudly, in a man’s world.