It’s difficult to believe that a decade has passed since a sun-kissed teen soap set in Newport Beach, California, made its debut. For two and a half seasons out of its four-year run, The O.C. was the biggest, bloggiest thing in the pop-culture universe.
The primetime Fox melodrama had the elements of great television: turmoil and tragedy, alpha kids and assholes, sidekicks and secrets. Not only did The O.C. turn fresh faces into household names. At its zenith it made an unlikely star out of a Southern California coastal town that was, in fact, a hyperreal conflation of several Southern California coastal towns.
Self-awareness
The O.C. tread on the dewy slope of teen TV before social media and online streaming altered the dynamic between shows and potential fans. I can’t recall exactly how I found out about it in the fall of 2003, but I’m certain that it’s the first show I ever loved and the last one I watched — along with One Tree Hill — while it was actually on. There were no on-screen hashtags to emphasize key scenes. Neither were there tweets that poked holes in the plotline. Without those distractions, The O.C. felt like it was made specifically for me and my friends.
While the pilot yielded some truly golden scenes, it would be a mistake to assume that the show began and ended with the catchphrase “Welcome to the O.C., bitch!†It extended beyond its narrative to establish a brand of self-awareness that would not only define itself, but also the era which produced it.
With the exception of 2000’s short-lived Grosse Pointe — a WB nighttime soap about a fictitious WB nighttime soap, also called Grosse Pointe – I had never seen anything that mocked itself so casually as The O.C. “Remember The Valley? The show-within-a-show on The O.C. that had Ryan and Seth and Marissa and Summer parroting all the things fans of The O.C. were saying about them?†wrote GQ’s Daniel Riley.
Surplus of youth
Then, of course, came the characters, a surplus of youth perfumed, it would seem, by sunblock. Seth (Adam Brody), the Woody Allen for the early aughts; Ryan (Ben McKenzie), the brooding outsider with a taste for wifebeaters; Marissa (Mischa Barton), the poor little rich girl with cheekbones that recall a typical Byzantine Madonna; and Summer (Rachel Bilson), the BFF who was surprisingly capable of both nouns and verbs.
“You know — never say never,†Barton, 27, told Us Weekly on the possibility of a 10-year reunion. “But, I think things have to feel right and it doesn’t feel right.†Of the core four, her Marissa Cooper was the only one to be mercy-killed, perishing in a car accident at the end of the third season to Imogen Heap’s Hallelujah. Looking back, the London-born actress seemed set for dizzying echelons of megastardom. But following her exit from The O.C., she has struggled to regain a semblance of a noteworthy career. In 2009, her CW series The Beautiful Life: TBL was canceled after only two episodes due to astonishingly low ratings.
Burn bright, burn fast
The rest of the cast, meanwhile, has had better luck. Ben McKenzie went on to star in the excellent cop drama Southland. Rachel Bilson is still visible on the small screen, playing the titular character on The CW’s Hart of Dixie. Adam Brody has since appeared in a string of film roles, from Mr. & Mrs. Smith and Jennifer’s Body to Scream 4 and Lovelace. Gossip Girl’s Dan Humphrey was supposedly the beta version of his Seth Cohen, but I see it more in the person of Stiles Stilinski, Dylan O’Brien’s Teen Wolf character.
The Internet still simmers with The O.C. worship, though it does so at a respectful distance. As series creator Josh Schwartz —who, at 26, became one of the youngest executive producers of a network series — told TVGuide.com, “I think shows like this tend to happen no matter what. They really capture a time and a moment and they burn really, really bright but they burn really fast.â€
Truth be told, hearing the strains of any Phantom Planet song — or anything from the soundtrack, really — still leaves me a little misty-eyed. I will always remember how it was when The O.C. first aired, when life was easy, the world was new and I was that young.
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