I love this show. It's a beautifully engineered situation comedy where disaster seems to align like the stars; miscommunication, ill intent and stupidity coming together in a way that's unpredictable and yet inevitable. But it would make a terrible film. For starters there isn't really a plot. More of a background against which the chaos unfolds - small manageable outbreaks of social carnage that work in a twenty minute episode. Small things mount up into a genius comedic crescendos as all the finely engineered pieces come together. Trying to stretch that into a ninety minute film just won't work because elongating such carefully crafted moments will either drag things out or worse need some overall motivating plot device to force the cast through an hour and a half of improvised dialogue. It would basically be a huge mistake.
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Agreed, although I think the characters are strong enough to hold up a proper hour-long narrative. I mean, if you string most of season 3 together it's pretty much a movie, with all the Iraq business and whatnot.
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