A Decade’s Worth of Memories - A Tribute to "The OC"
*Alert: This essay contains spoilers for the entire run of “The OC”. The show aired from 2003 to 2007, so really, you should’ve watched it by now. However, there’s still time, and I recommend it.
I was working on another essay to post when I learned that “The OC” ended 10 years ago today (thanks for the heads-up, People’s Choice), and I couldn’t let such a milestone pass unheeded.
I fell in love with “The OC” right from the start - okay, let me amend that. I loved the first season. I loved the fact that despite everything, Sandy and Kirsten fought for their marriage and together provided an anchor midst the dramatic maelstrom that was life in Orange County. I loved that Ryan and Seth had each other’s backs right from the start. I loved that Julie was a mom whose questionable priorities concealed humble beginnings she was determined to leave behind. I loved watching Summer grow the kind of party girl who dumped a passed-out Marissa on her front lawn to being a loyal friend. I loved Seth’s Chrismukkah traditions and the OC women’s dedication to their yogalates classes. I loved that Ryan, from Chino (which was evidently poor and dangerous), was supposed to be the bad element when in fact, all he really did was drink a bit of alcohol, smoke cigarettes, and got into fights to settle arguments. He wasn’t a virgin (but he didn’t brag and probably got the least amount of nookie out of all of the main characters on the show), but he stayed away from drugs (even marijuana), protected women, studied hard, and loved his family. The first OC party he attended in the pilot, he walked by teens snorting coke and encountered couples cheating with each other’s so-called friends. And he was the boy the parents didn’t want around their children.
The person I didn’t love was Marissa, even though most boys (and at least one girl) on the show fell for her. Marissa drank too much, had family issues, made poor choices in pretty much every aspect of her life, lacked direction and discipline, took drugs sporadically, suffered from depression, shoplifted on at least one occasion, and tried to overdose on pills. What did she have going for her? She was thin, pretty, and not a ‘mean girl’ even though she was, evidently, the most popular girl in their private school. Most importantly, she was constantly in peril. Everyone wanted to protect poor Marissa, and she was used to being saved. She was also passively poisonous, the beautiful ship whose propeller happened to chew up those who drew too near. Ryan’s brother got shot and fell into a coma, the bus driving him out of town being the only thing that saved him from returning to jail or suffering the fate of poor Johnny Harper, whose injuries from a car accident cost him a surfing career. Johnny continued to spend time with Marissa until he became so drunk and depressed that he fell off a cliff to his death. Kevin Volchok eventually turned himself into authorities and went to jail, most likely for vehicular manslaughter, after running Ryan and Marissa off the road. Ryan was almost arrested a few times: when Marissa had alcohol in the car (they were both underage), when she got caught shoplifting, when her mother arranged for Ryan to be blamed for shooting his brother (when it was actually Marissa), when he almost confessed to a crime to save Marissa from jail (Ryan’s brother beat him to it.). He was almost killed (by his brother and by Volchok), was beaten up (by Luke and almost by Volchok and Volchok’s friends) - in each instance, indirectly due to Marissa’s poor decisions.
I must confess that I stopped watching halfway through season 2 when the show first aired. I just couldn’t watch Marissa singlehandedly wiping out the teenage male population in town.
But then I heard that Marissa was going to die, and it was, as the opening song’s chorus by Phantom Planet goes, “California, here we coooomme!” once again. I tuned in to the final couple of episodes in season 3 and watched Marissa die in the middle of the road due to Volchok’s obsession with her.
Some say that season 4 jumped the shark because Ryan was involved in cage fighting, but it made complete sense to anyone who knew anything about him. Ryan deliberately didn’t fight in the cage. Feeling guilty for not being able to save Marissa, he stood there letting men beat on him until he couldn’t stand as a form of penance. He cut himself off from the Cohens, because he didn’t feel he deserved to be happy. The cage-fighting scenario was brilliant, because the pain was familiar to him after growing up in an abusive household.
I don’t want to say that I liked season 4 better than season 1, but I think it might be true. Season 4 developed Taylor Townsend into a sweet, brilliant stalker with attachment issues, exactly what Ryan needed. While she was strange, she was never a victim and didn’t need Ryan to save her. What she did do was make him laugh and allowed him to find balance in his life. Kaitlin, Marissa’s younger sister, remained in town and kept everyone on their toes, including forcing her mother, Julie, to grow up and learn how to take care of herself instead of relying on wealthy husbands. Summer found her bliss, and Seth learned that Summer’s running toward something didn’t mean that she was leaving him behind. Sandy tried to find a guy he could hang out with and learned that he was happiest at home hanging out with Kirsten.
I would’ve happily watched a few more seasons with Taylor and Ryan mixing it up, Seth and Summer (and their ‘child’, the rabbit Pancakes) figuring out their college messes, The Bullit (“Bam!”) and Frank Atwood both trying to woo Julie (who was pregnant with Frank’s baby), Sandy and Kirsten raising their unplanned baby girl. I wanted to know more about The Bullit’s sons (each, with the exception of Spencer, named after cities where his oil refineries were located - Austin, Dallas, Houston, Lubbock, Odessa, El Paso, Amarillo, Texarkana, San Antonio, Corpus Christi, and Hanoi. I can only hope that they each had a different mother -that could’ve been an AMAZING spinoff!). I wanted to find out how the brilliantly manipulative Kaitlin chose to utilize her skills once she became an adult and what happened to Luke and his twin brothers, Brad and Eric. I wanted Luke’s dad to find a man and settle down. I wanted to know if Kirsten’s sister, Hailey, and Julie’s first husband, Jimmy, ever got their acts together.
Thanks to SoapNet, I did go back and watch the episodes that I’d missed, and there were some true gems in there: Ryan heading to Seattle to fetch Seth back home, Ryan leaning into Sandy as he watched his brother’s bus leave town, everything with the Nana (Seth’s grandmother, played by the amazing Linda Lavin), Ryan realizing that there were some girls out there who will deliberately put themselves in harm’s way in order to be saved - and that he didn’t always need to be the one to save them, Kaitlin getting into all kinds of mischief without crossing the line from mischievous to despicable.
The list of actors who passed through the show during its four-year tenure is quite impressive (and these are just the ones I remember): Alan Dale, Amber Heard, Chris Brown, Chris Pratt, Colin Hanks, Eric Balfour, Eric Mabius, George Lucas (as himself), Gilles Marini, Jaime King, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Jeri Ryan, Kevin Sorbo, Kim Delaney, the aforementioned Linda Lavin, Lucy Hale, Max Greenfield, Michael Nouri , Morena Baccarin (who is now on “Gotham” with her new husband, Benjamin Mackenzie, which begs the question: did they ever meet on “The OC”? They didn’t have any scenes together - at least none that made it to air.), Nikki Reed, Olivia Wilde, Paris Hilton, Paul Wesley, Robert Picardo, Shailene Woodley, Steve-O, Tia Carrere, T.J. Thyne, and Tony Denison.
It’s also impossible to talk about the show without discussing the music. They highlighted a lot of indie rock bands, none of whom I followed. According to IMDB and Wikipedia, Modest Mouse, Rooney, The Killers, Death Cab for Cutie, and The Subways all performed on the show, probably at The Bait Shop where Seth was employed (but where he never actually worked) and where Olivia Wilde’s Alex actually did work. I will say that each of the show’s 6 CD “mixtapes” are fantastic, introducing me to musicians like Jem (who performed a terrific version of Paul McCartney’s “Maybe I’m Amazed” at Julie’s wedding to Caleb) and Imogen Heap. But throughout the run of the show, I also heard plenty of songs I recognized: Boys II Men’s “End of the Road”, Jeff Buckley’s "Hallelujah", Journey’s “Open Arms” and “Separate Ways (Worlds Apart)”, The Killers’ “Mr. Brightside” and “Smile Like You Mean It”, Tom Jones’ “It’s Not Unusual”, The Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.”, Whitesnake’s “Here I Go Again”, Will Smith’s “Miami”. While this show didn’t introduce me to Joseph Arthur, it did gift me with his “Honey and the Moon”.
After the show was cancelled, I confess that I tried to fill the void with “OC” creator Josh Schwartz’s new show, “Gossip Girl” (which he developed from a series of books by Cecily von Ziegesar), but where “The OC” was a cold beer on a hot day (refreshing, and the perfect way to decompress from the real world), “GG” was a Long Island Iced Tea (too many flavors jammed together with a potency that ensures regret the next day). “Gossip Girl” had no Kirsten and Sandy, no foundation - the adults were just as messed up as their kids, making the same poor decisions and unable to commit to romantic relationships or even, most times, their own children. They cheated on each other, travelled in helicopters to other countries and to the Hamptons, attempted to purchase their own burlesque clubs. It’s not that “Gossip Girl” wasn’t good on its own merits; it just wasn’t a satisfying replacement for “The OC”.
I headed to the past to try to find a show that could help me, and I ended up thirteen years back and about an hour down the road in Beverly Hills…90210 with Jim and Cindy Walsh. Brandon and Brenda’s parents ended up being the grounding support for all of their children’s friends, but they rarely had their own storylines. Cindy never developed a drinking problem or felt guilty about the last words she shouted at her father before he died. Jim never faced temptation with a former flame while stranded alone in a hotel room. Neither gave up their position as head of a company because they realized that their family needed them more.
When “The OC” worked, it was fantastic television. It had a couple who wasn’t perfect but who provided proof that healthy marriages - and good parents - could exist on an entertaining show. It had good kids who made lots of bad choices but many of those for the right reasons and most of the time to help out the others. It had characters that I still miss, ten years after its last episode, and actors whose careers I still follow and support when I can (I proudly own Peter Gallagher’s CD, “7 Days in Memphis” and used to watch him weekly in “Covert Affairs”; I currently watch Benjamin McKenzie in “Gotham” and have watched Adam Brody in quite a few movies. I regularly tuned in to Rachel Bilson’s “Hart of Dixie” and gave Mischa Barton’s “The Beautiful Life” a try. If I hear they’re in a project, I’ll watch at least the first episode of any show featuring Melinda Clarke - who could have chemistry with a telephone pole if she chose, Autumn Reeser, and Chris Carmack.)
I own the box set and have some of my favorite scenes saved on my DVR for when I need a quick dose of Seth and Ryan’s commiserating or Taylor’s stalking or Summer’s rage blackouts. I’ve found other shows to love, but “The OC” will forever hold a special place in my heart.
Credits: imdb.com, peopleschoice.com, Wikipedia
I was working on another essay to post when I learned that “The OC” ended 10 years ago today (thanks for the heads-up, People’s Choice), and I couldn’t let such a milestone pass unheeded.
I fell in love with “The OC” right from the start - okay, let me amend that. I loved the first season. I loved the fact that despite everything, Sandy and Kirsten fought for their marriage and together provided an anchor midst the dramatic maelstrom that was life in Orange County. I loved that Ryan and Seth had each other’s backs right from the start. I loved that Julie was a mom whose questionable priorities concealed humble beginnings she was determined to leave behind. I loved watching Summer grow the kind of party girl who dumped a passed-out Marissa on her front lawn to being a loyal friend. I loved Seth’s Chrismukkah traditions and the OC women’s dedication to their yogalates classes. I loved that Ryan, from Chino (which was evidently poor and dangerous), was supposed to be the bad element when in fact, all he really did was drink a bit of alcohol, smoke cigarettes, and got into fights to settle arguments. He wasn’t a virgin (but he didn’t brag and probably got the least amount of nookie out of all of the main characters on the show), but he stayed away from drugs (even marijuana), protected women, studied hard, and loved his family. The first OC party he attended in the pilot, he walked by teens snorting coke and encountered couples cheating with each other’s so-called friends. And he was the boy the parents didn’t want around their children.
The person I didn’t love was Marissa, even though most boys (and at least one girl) on the show fell for her. Marissa drank too much, had family issues, made poor choices in pretty much every aspect of her life, lacked direction and discipline, took drugs sporadically, suffered from depression, shoplifted on at least one occasion, and tried to overdose on pills. What did she have going for her? She was thin, pretty, and not a ‘mean girl’ even though she was, evidently, the most popular girl in their private school. Most importantly, she was constantly in peril. Everyone wanted to protect poor Marissa, and she was used to being saved. She was also passively poisonous, the beautiful ship whose propeller happened to chew up those who drew too near. Ryan’s brother got shot and fell into a coma, the bus driving him out of town being the only thing that saved him from returning to jail or suffering the fate of poor Johnny Harper, whose injuries from a car accident cost him a surfing career. Johnny continued to spend time with Marissa until he became so drunk and depressed that he fell off a cliff to his death. Kevin Volchok eventually turned himself into authorities and went to jail, most likely for vehicular manslaughter, after running Ryan and Marissa off the road. Ryan was almost arrested a few times: when Marissa had alcohol in the car (they were both underage), when she got caught shoplifting, when her mother arranged for Ryan to be blamed for shooting his brother (when it was actually Marissa), when he almost confessed to a crime to save Marissa from jail (Ryan’s brother beat him to it.). He was almost killed (by his brother and by Volchok), was beaten up (by Luke and almost by Volchok and Volchok’s friends) - in each instance, indirectly due to Marissa’s poor decisions.
I must confess that I stopped watching halfway through season 2 when the show first aired. I just couldn’t watch Marissa singlehandedly wiping out the teenage male population in town.
But then I heard that Marissa was going to die, and it was, as the opening song’s chorus by Phantom Planet goes, “California, here we coooomme!” once again. I tuned in to the final couple of episodes in season 3 and watched Marissa die in the middle of the road due to Volchok’s obsession with her.
Some say that season 4 jumped the shark because Ryan was involved in cage fighting, but it made complete sense to anyone who knew anything about him. Ryan deliberately didn’t fight in the cage. Feeling guilty for not being able to save Marissa, he stood there letting men beat on him until he couldn’t stand as a form of penance. He cut himself off from the Cohens, because he didn’t feel he deserved to be happy. The cage-fighting scenario was brilliant, because the pain was familiar to him after growing up in an abusive household.
I don’t want to say that I liked season 4 better than season 1, but I think it might be true. Season 4 developed Taylor Townsend into a sweet, brilliant stalker with attachment issues, exactly what Ryan needed. While she was strange, she was never a victim and didn’t need Ryan to save her. What she did do was make him laugh and allowed him to find balance in his life. Kaitlin, Marissa’s younger sister, remained in town and kept everyone on their toes, including forcing her mother, Julie, to grow up and learn how to take care of herself instead of relying on wealthy husbands. Summer found her bliss, and Seth learned that Summer’s running toward something didn’t mean that she was leaving him behind. Sandy tried to find a guy he could hang out with and learned that he was happiest at home hanging out with Kirsten.
I would’ve happily watched a few more seasons with Taylor and Ryan mixing it up, Seth and Summer (and their ‘child’, the rabbit Pancakes) figuring out their college messes, The Bullit (“Bam!”) and Frank Atwood both trying to woo Julie (who was pregnant with Frank’s baby), Sandy and Kirsten raising their unplanned baby girl. I wanted to know more about The Bullit’s sons (each, with the exception of Spencer, named after cities where his oil refineries were located - Austin, Dallas, Houston, Lubbock, Odessa, El Paso, Amarillo, Texarkana, San Antonio, Corpus Christi, and Hanoi. I can only hope that they each had a different mother -that could’ve been an AMAZING spinoff!). I wanted to find out how the brilliantly manipulative Kaitlin chose to utilize her skills once she became an adult and what happened to Luke and his twin brothers, Brad and Eric. I wanted Luke’s dad to find a man and settle down. I wanted to know if Kirsten’s sister, Hailey, and Julie’s first husband, Jimmy, ever got their acts together.
Thanks to SoapNet, I did go back and watch the episodes that I’d missed, and there were some true gems in there: Ryan heading to Seattle to fetch Seth back home, Ryan leaning into Sandy as he watched his brother’s bus leave town, everything with the Nana (Seth’s grandmother, played by the amazing Linda Lavin), Ryan realizing that there were some girls out there who will deliberately put themselves in harm’s way in order to be saved - and that he didn’t always need to be the one to save them, Kaitlin getting into all kinds of mischief without crossing the line from mischievous to despicable.
The list of actors who passed through the show during its four-year tenure is quite impressive (and these are just the ones I remember): Alan Dale, Amber Heard, Chris Brown, Chris Pratt, Colin Hanks, Eric Balfour, Eric Mabius, George Lucas (as himself), Gilles Marini, Jaime King, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Jeri Ryan, Kevin Sorbo, Kim Delaney, the aforementioned Linda Lavin, Lucy Hale, Max Greenfield, Michael Nouri , Morena Baccarin (who is now on “Gotham” with her new husband, Benjamin Mackenzie, which begs the question: did they ever meet on “The OC”? They didn’t have any scenes together - at least none that made it to air.), Nikki Reed, Olivia Wilde, Paris Hilton, Paul Wesley, Robert Picardo, Shailene Woodley, Steve-O, Tia Carrere, T.J. Thyne, and Tony Denison.
It’s also impossible to talk about the show without discussing the music. They highlighted a lot of indie rock bands, none of whom I followed. According to IMDB and Wikipedia, Modest Mouse, Rooney, The Killers, Death Cab for Cutie, and The Subways all performed on the show, probably at The Bait Shop where Seth was employed (but where he never actually worked) and where Olivia Wilde’s Alex actually did work. I will say that each of the show’s 6 CD “mixtapes” are fantastic, introducing me to musicians like Jem (who performed a terrific version of Paul McCartney’s “Maybe I’m Amazed” at Julie’s wedding to Caleb) and Imogen Heap. But throughout the run of the show, I also heard plenty of songs I recognized: Boys II Men’s “End of the Road”, Jeff Buckley’s "Hallelujah", Journey’s “Open Arms” and “Separate Ways (Worlds Apart)”, The Killers’ “Mr. Brightside” and “Smile Like You Mean It”, Tom Jones’ “It’s Not Unusual”, The Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.”, Whitesnake’s “Here I Go Again”, Will Smith’s “Miami”. While this show didn’t introduce me to Joseph Arthur, it did gift me with his “Honey and the Moon”.
After the show was cancelled, I confess that I tried to fill the void with “OC” creator Josh Schwartz’s new show, “Gossip Girl” (which he developed from a series of books by Cecily von Ziegesar), but where “The OC” was a cold beer on a hot day (refreshing, and the perfect way to decompress from the real world), “GG” was a Long Island Iced Tea (too many flavors jammed together with a potency that ensures regret the next day). “Gossip Girl” had no Kirsten and Sandy, no foundation - the adults were just as messed up as their kids, making the same poor decisions and unable to commit to romantic relationships or even, most times, their own children. They cheated on each other, travelled in helicopters to other countries and to the Hamptons, attempted to purchase their own burlesque clubs. It’s not that “Gossip Girl” wasn’t good on its own merits; it just wasn’t a satisfying replacement for “The OC”.
I headed to the past to try to find a show that could help me, and I ended up thirteen years back and about an hour down the road in Beverly Hills…90210 with Jim and Cindy Walsh. Brandon and Brenda’s parents ended up being the grounding support for all of their children’s friends, but they rarely had their own storylines. Cindy never developed a drinking problem or felt guilty about the last words she shouted at her father before he died. Jim never faced temptation with a former flame while stranded alone in a hotel room. Neither gave up their position as head of a company because they realized that their family needed them more.
When “The OC” worked, it was fantastic television. It had a couple who wasn’t perfect but who provided proof that healthy marriages - and good parents - could exist on an entertaining show. It had good kids who made lots of bad choices but many of those for the right reasons and most of the time to help out the others. It had characters that I still miss, ten years after its last episode, and actors whose careers I still follow and support when I can (I proudly own Peter Gallagher’s CD, “7 Days in Memphis” and used to watch him weekly in “Covert Affairs”; I currently watch Benjamin McKenzie in “Gotham” and have watched Adam Brody in quite a few movies. I regularly tuned in to Rachel Bilson’s “Hart of Dixie” and gave Mischa Barton’s “The Beautiful Life” a try. If I hear they’re in a project, I’ll watch at least the first episode of any show featuring Melinda Clarke - who could have chemistry with a telephone pole if she chose, Autumn Reeser, and Chris Carmack.)
I own the box set and have some of my favorite scenes saved on my DVR for when I need a quick dose of Seth and Ryan’s commiserating or Taylor’s stalking or Summer’s rage blackouts. I’ve found other shows to love, but “The OC” will forever hold a special place in my heart.
Credits: imdb.com, peopleschoice.com, Wikipedia