Friday, January 24, 2014

7 things I discovered rewatching the OC season 1


 I remember when Thursdays used to mean I was going to black the fuck out with upper middle class people that shared my ideals and values. Those values were expensive clothing, a physically fit appearance and non-committal drunken sex with people within the circle. There were no worries about STD's or pregnancies because "hey, scabies and hepatitis C don't vacation in Carmel" and everyone's parents put them on a steady regiment of birth control at the age of 16.

Unfortunately, gone are the hairy bears, gone is the playground afforded to me by my Greek System bubble...the worst part of graduating could arguably be the loss of a social eco-system in which the overbearing bro archtype is king. Now I live in a sess pool of liberalism that makes my head hurt, I can't even go to Deadspin anymore because of shit like this...

Bush is Back and no, not that Bush. If W were in power my company would still be forced to give me health insurance. But mere hours after I wrote an entire blog comparing pubic trimming to laziness, American Apparel has to go out and start the trend that waxing is no longer the preferred look? "I don't want my partner to look like a pre-pubescent girl!" Oh what a hot feminist take! Well I don't like my partner looking like a grizzly bear, and I also don't think a pro-fat message should be preached because obese people die earlier but I guess I'm just a relic of the past at this point, fuck me.

Also what the fuck is all the outrage about Justin Bieber I understand he is a colossal douchebag and everything, but SPARE ME the pictures of horrifically disfigured DUI victims. He was fucking .04. Every single one of you drives at .04, your parents drive at .04, even if you don't drink, you've sucked down enough Listerine to hit .04. He was driving 55 down a closed down street in Miami with another douchebag, but they weren't endangering anyone's life. #deportbieber how about we deport the illegals that don't pay taxes. Again, what an insensitive thing of me to say.

So what are we? A society of acceptance or do we want to have a lynching of a Canadian pop icon because we're jealous that we can't be the ones having all the fun. (Read that, it's an excellent PGP article)

I just can't take it anymore. I don't live in a world of like minded frat guys and sorostitutes (that wouldn't dare sport bush) anymore. I wish that island existed, but it doesn't.

We live in a fucked up world where Grantland writer's basically get accused of murder for outing transexual con-artists. When did everyone have to start forming and sharing their opinion on everything (yes I have an opinion but this is my blog...I go to deadspin and Grantland for sports and dick jokes) sometimes the real world is annoying and I had to escape just for an afternoon to my 2nd favorite place in the whole wide world...

Orange County.

Oh no, I didn't drive the 40 miles down the PCH to Newport Beach. I took it one step further. Over 48 hours I rewatched the entire first season of The OC. To say the least, it was magical. No arguments about gay marriage or marijuana legalization, no feminist opinion columns, just attractive people and simple plot lines.

For those of you who don't remember, or didn't watch to begin with, the OC really caught lightning in a bottle. For 27 hours (27 episodes season 1) the melodrama of a kid from the other side of the tracks moving to a rich town captivated a large portion of generation Y. I don't know if it was the likable actors, the sharp writing of Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage or if it was just the perfect teen soap for a lost generation of millenials in the mid oughts. That said, 10 years later the show still holds up as well as it did in 2003. In fact, if anything, going back to rewatch it showed me how far superior it was to Schwartz's major primetime follow up, Gossip Girl. (And this is not my west coast bias, OC > GG is fact not opinion.)

Please, cue the Phantom Planet and allow me to take a trip down memory lane and point out 7 things that I rediscovered from watching the single greatest season of television ever produced.

1. Oliver is the worst fucking character of all time.
I am far from the first person to make this statement, I think it's pretty much universally accepted.
This character gave me a fucking migraine, every time he would appear on screen I would go into panic attacks. Never have I wanted to jump through the television and murder a character more.
Think about the worst things ever done on a TV show. A few of the Todd murders from Breaking Bad were pretty rough, Wallace getting killed was pretty demoralizing in The Wire, but STILL...nothing compares to Oliver's rat faced weaselness.

Upon doing some further research, Taylor Handley's career hasn't done that well either. He has consistently booked a few guest starring roles on network tv in the years since, and he even booked a gig as a regular on the ill-fated CBS show 'Vegas.' But that show didn't see a second season and many of the other shows he has touched have turned to shit because Hollywood executives and the American public can't get over the fact that this motherfucker is Oliver and he is AWFUL.

2. Summer was really a massive cunt.
Rachel Bilson was initially only a guest star with a limited story arc (she didn't become a regular until either season 2 or late in season 1) as I imagine the scope of the series was originally going to be much smaller: following Ryan on his journey from Chino to Newport under the supervision of the affable Cohen clan. (His nemesis, Chris Carmack DID receive star billing) However, my assumption is that when the world fell in love with Seth Cohen, producers decided he needed more screen time and story lines thus the Summer vs. Anna triangle.

The problem was, producers had painted themselves into a corner by making Summer the most unlikable bitch on the tv show. She was basically the female version of Luke. She was a drunk, a slut and consistently would shit all over Seth and Ryan both. Anna was amazing, she was a dream girl, fun, quirky like a Zooey Deschanel that doesn't suck (think Elf instead of New Girl) The story dragged for almost all of season 1, but when the writers finally had to make a choice they went Summer, presumably because Rachel Bilson was more classically beautiful than Samaire Armstrong? Summer would grow to become a great character later in the show's run, so much so that you forget how awful she was initially.

3. Stefan Salvatore is the punk that shot Luke
Clearly the OC had a much larger following than the Vampire Diaries, but you can imagine my delight when I found out that Paul Wesley is the bartender at The Crab Shack who hails from the same type of rough neighborhood as Ryan. After he and Ryan (and Seth) strike up a relationship, Wesley's character convinces Seth to take him to a Newport party. You may remember early in the season Ryan and Marissa swimming on some sort of quasi-date. Seth interrupts because Paul Wesley pulls a gun and is about to shoot everyone. Luke gets shot in the arm, Wesley gets arrested BUT when Marissa visits Luke in the hospital they get back together and then they FUCK. (She breaks up with him after he is caught cheating 2 episodes later but god dammit that virginity should have been Ryan's) Fun note: Paul Wesley was still going by his Jewish sounding Polish name at the time, Paul Wasilewski.

4. The first season was picked up for a back order...twice
Here is a little inside baseball for you. Most first season shows are given an initial order of 12 episodes (plus the pilot for 13) if about halfway through the season things are going well, the network will order an additional 9 episodes, bringing the total season to 22. The OC had an initial order of 16, then was picked up for a back 6 (bringing the total to 22, a full season) but with room on the schedule and interest from all parties the season was extended AGAIN by 5 more episodes. So if it seems like the first season of the OC went on forever, it's because it kinda did. The first season spanned almost an entire year, and was 5 hours longer than most hour long drama series.

5. The Non-Newportcentric episodes were AT BEST tolerable
When the show was at it's best, it was exploring the metaphorical impact of a fish out of water. Ryan, going from the ghetto to the richest of the rich. I think in the first season, writers thought that another black tie party, Cotillion, yacht party would bore the audience. Once every 6 episodes or so, the action was taken out of Newport. And while episodes in Vegas, LA and Tijuana were pretty great...any episode that explored Ryan's past was a fucking train wreck. First you have the aforementioned ghetto coworker who shot someone and got Ryan in trouble, then there was the whole Trey thing (DIFFERENT actor than Logan Marshall Green aka Trey season 2/guy who bangs Lisbeth Salander in Prometheus) where Ryan goes back to Chino, introducing us to Theresa UGHHHHHHHHHH. She was the fucking worst, why can't she make like a good little hoodrat and get killed by a stray bullet. Anyway, I understand that in a 'drama' things can't just be going swell for all of our favorite characters the whole time, but anything that ever got in between Ryan and Marissa was enough to drive me to murder.

I was never as connected to the whole Seth/Summer thing (maybe it was lingering feelings for Anna) but you try to separate Ryan Atwood and Marissa Cooper we have a problem. (I was even pissed at Olivia Wilde for muching her box in season 2)

When you look back at much of the rest of the series run betwixt Ryan and Marissa, they were rarely together, in fact other than a solid 5 episode run in the middle of the first season, it was really all downhill from the time they met (fucking Volchek and Chris Pratt)

6. Sandy and Kiersten Cohen, the couple that came SO CLOSE to adultery.
For whatever reason, I had always kind of thought that the will they/won't they took place entirely in season 2. Sandy with his client and Kiersten with her magazine editor. That was wrong. They are on the verge of throwing it all away by basically the 3rd episode. Tate Donovan is hot and heavy for his high school girlfriend, even attempting to kiss her at some point. On the flip side, Sandy Cohen is relentlessly pursued by a hiring partner at his law firm.

Sandy Cohen is the best tv dad of all time. He is fucking amazing in almost every aspect. He surfed every day before work, he stood by Ryan always and he gave that kind of dopey advice with just the amount of embarrassing dad humor. Meanwhile Kiersten was about as cool as a Real Housewife of the OC can get. For this reason, had either of them actually ever cheated I would have lost all faith in the institution of marriage. Their marriage as a storyline pretty much always went in 5 episode arcs where they would reach their breaking point, only for Kiersten to realize at the last possible moment, how amazing Sandy Cohen is.

7. It's probably the last big 4 network teen drama we will ever give a shit about
Gossip Girl got close to cultural relevance on the CW a few years ago, but the innocence of the mid 2000's is gone. It's the last generation that didn't grow up with sexting on iPhones and accessible molly. This was a show about teens drinking, making some bad decisions with a little bit of cocaine and some prescription pills. That can't be recaptured. With an ever evolving reliance on technology, plotlines would now revolve around Luke leaking a screenshotted snap of Marisa's tits, or Melinda Clarke running a background check on Ryan using her iPad. It's just over.

The consumption would be different too. I used to go to a friend's house (she was a girl!) every Thursday night to watch the show (on a school night!) Now people would watch in in bed on Hulu, or bingewatch a season on NetFlix, alas destroying some of the magic of watching it live with a big group. I remember senior year spending all day Wednesday (or Thursday or Friday, it moved around a lot) talking about the previous night's episode.

The major networks don't even target teen dramas anymore, the CW has a monopoly on it (and a little on ABC Family) and even those shows are skewing younger and more female more every year.

Maybe it's for the best that we just remember Newport Beach as a picturesque dreamworld that we visited once a week, once upon a time. (I've been to the real Newport Beach, it's pretty rad but not much like what was seen on the show...it was primarily shot in Malibu and the South Bay)

And if you're ever having a rough hangover day, every episode is available on iTunes for the reasonable price of 2 bucks a pop. (It's the best investment you'll ever make) In retrospect it was a great show, and a reminder that the coming of age tale is an American Tradition like no other.

Buried somewhere deep in my childhood home is a lime green Ipod mini that probably still has every OC soundtrack on it. (My GOD, how did we not touch on the MUSIC?!?!?! Talk about cultural phenomenon) I may need to dig that up next time I go home so I can throw on some Ronney and remember exactly what it feels like to be 17 again.





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