Sarah Hughes, the Observer’s digital TV previewer, on TV’s troubled university years:

Why can’t television do college?

The recent cancellation of Veronica Mars has been blamed on many things from poor ratings to the perceived stupidity of its US broadcaster, CW network, but in reality it came down to one thing: Veronica Mars at high school was a sharp, smart show with dark plotlines, well-developed characters and witty dialogue. Veronica Mars at college? Wasn’t.

In place of those well-developed characters with their interesting interplay with each other, we were given every American college cliché Veronica’s creator Rob Thomas could come up with.

From the lazy, drunken, sexist jocks at their frat houses to the men-hating feminists who just happened to run the local university paper and lived to shut the frat houses down. In place of Veronica’s high school universe with its subtly delineated cliques, we had an amorphous bunch of people you really couldn’t care less about who behaved the way they did because, hey, that’s how people on the football team, in chess club, at the college newspaper behave.

And, if that wasn’t bad enough, our heroine herself lost her sting as the series drifted into an endless tangle of romantic triangles involving Veronica, her boyfriend Logan - also suddenly mysteriously sans sting - and new boy Piz, whose role mainly consisted on hanging around wondering where his gorm had gone while looking mournfully at Veronica.

Sure there were plots - a rape storyline, a murder later on in the season - but they lacked the cohesion of the Lilly Kane murder in season one or even last year’s bus crush mystery.

Yet it’s not just Veronica who suffered from the tertiary education blues. For something strange happens to high school dramas once they move from graduation into the student world. Just as the best teen dramas remain those that were cancelled before college called - My So Called Life and Freaks and Geeks to name two - so those that head for degreeworld invariably come unstuck.

In Buffy The Vampire Slayer, our heroine struggled to fit in and eventually dropped out, meanwhile best friend Willow embraced her dark side in a ludicrous ’magic equals drugs’ subplot and Xander simply drifted around the edges, not at college but not really doing much else. The only person to flourish was posh girl Cordy who headed for LA, the real world - or as real as it gets in a Joss Whedon show - and an entirely series.

Beverly Hills 90210 suffered a similar drift as its ageing seniors graduated and headed for college only to find themselves sucked into the obligatory drugs and despair plots. By the time it - finally - ended Shannon Doherty appeared to be the only cast member not to have had a drugs storyline, and again that’s because she’d bailed - or been pushed - into a different show.

Futher proof? Dawson’s Creek - nothing but an endless circle consisting of whether Joey Potter would choose Dawson, Pacey or herself?

The OC - tried to break the mould by sending people to different universities, ended up not sure what was going on, forced Summer to take an unlikely political stance and return home.

And please let’s draw a veil over Saved By The Bell: The College Years and that dreadful Lisa Bonet Cosby spin-off - small wonder that the makers of One Tree Hill have decided to skip the traumatic college years and fast forward by four.

For the sad truth is that college just doesn’t work on TV. It should do - after all universities are as cliquey and hermetically sealed off as high schools can be and American ones, with their frats and sorieties, their clubs and their gangs, are more so than most.

Maybe it’s that the actors all look a bit too old after their time on the high school beat or maybe the writers enjoyed college more and thus aren’t as bitter as they were about school. Whatever the reasons the fact remains if you want to tune into a clinical dissection of higher education Donna Tartt’s Secret History proves that you’re better off with a book.