Quick thoughts I wrote down while rewatching the entirety of The O.C. this year. Written over a few weeks and assembled into some sort of order, but not really edited in any way.
I’ve started rewatching The OC. I own it all on DVD, but I haven’t seen it since it was first on (and there’s a bunch of these very early episodes I’ve never seen before).
Halfway through the first season now (the first Chrismukkah episode, with Rachel Bilson in Wonder Woman cosplay), and fully into it.
Alan Dale has showed up in his original “stern businessman/over-protective-yet-loving father” role, which he’s been repeating for the last 15 years on at least half a dozen other shows. They’ve given Rachel Bilson more to do than the “mean girl” stereotype she was in the first few episodes, and they’ve made Luke less of a complete asshole, though they still have no idea what to do with him.
We’re in the middle of the Summer/Seth/Anna love triangle, and I always preferred Anna at the time, but find her more annoying this time around. Part of that is probably that I looked at Samaire Armstrong’s Twitter feed post-US election, and it was not pretty.
The weaknesses in Mischa Barton’s acting are clearer this time around, but she’s mostly in scenes with Ben McKenzie, who’s good enough to make up for it.
Now on to the start of The OC S2, where they brought in a whole bunch of new characters to act as love rivals, including a young Olivia Wilde. I remember even at the time being confused by how she got a job managing a nightclub at the age of seventeen.
The nightclub is mostly just an excuse for them to have a load of early-00s indie bands as guest stars, and I’ve no memory of how any of those acts hold up. (EDIT: Ooh, The Killers! Good get for 2004!)
They definitely seem to be leaning more into the comedy this season. In the first season Seth and Sandy got witty one-liners, now most of the rest of the cast do too.
After enjoying the first half of S2 more than I remembered, I’m up to some of the stuff that annoyed me about the middle seasons, mostly the awful comic book story, where Seth and Zach are able to get a meeting to sell a series to Wildstorm based only on a handful of sketches that Seth has done (despite him being an artist never coming up in the first 1.5 seasons of the show).
There’s also another dumb “Sandy and Kirsten’s marriage is in trouble” storyline, which are always terrible as nobody ever buys that they’ll actually break up.
Despite Mischa Barton’s acting, the high point of the show for me at this time is probably the Marissa/Alex storyline with her and Olivia Wilde.
Finished the second half of S2 of The O.C., which was mostly a mess, but still enjoyable.
The pacing of the storylines is all over the place: the Marissa/Alex relationship is over almost as soon as it’s begun, while the awful Seth/Summer/Zach love triangle carries on for the entire season for some reason.
The big storyline in the last batch of episodes is bringing in Ryan’s brother Trey, played by a young Logan Marshall-Green, who looks less like Tom Hardy and more like young Tim Olyphant at this point.
It’s one of the season’s better storylines, though the resolution does feature one of the most inadvertently hilarious music cues I’ve ever seen.
The song’s a callback to a funeral scene from earlier in the episode, which I think makes it worse. I love most of the music on the show, but for some reason, the timing of this just made me crack up this time around. I think it was a meme for a while?
The last few episodes of the season have Seth point out that he’s acted like a self-involved asshole for a lot of the season, which I found reassuring at the time, but now I know that he’s even worse in the third season, which I realise I remember very little of, except not liking a lot of it, especially the Sandy storylines.
The O.C. Season 3 is mostly as disappointing as I remember.
It kicks off with a stupid, pointless storyline about Jeri Ryan as a con artist that goes nowhere, then follows that up by giving Sandy a storyline where he’s put in charge of his wife’s family business for some reason and it’s so, so, boring and goes on all season.
The “Marissa goes to public school” storyline is just an excuse to bring in a bunch of awful new characters. Johnny the surfer dude is boring, and yet another character pining for Marissa is tiresome, and his sidekick Chili is annoying as hell. He’s supposed to be annoying, but the actor is dialled up far too high for it to be enjoyable.
The one good addition to the show this season is Autumn Reeser as Taylor Townsend, possibly my favourite character on the show. She’s a delight, and I wish Reeser was in more things.
I’m just up to the point where they brought back Marissa’s sister after almost two years, now played by Willa Holland and an actual character.
I’d always assumed it was an old-fashioned age-up of a kid character, but the original actress, Shailene Woodley, is the same age as Holland – the only reason she was recast is that she hadn’t gone through puberty yet.
Finished Season 3 of The O.C., and the back part of the season mostly just felt like they were killing time waiting for the season to end. It’s a 25-episode season, which is too long.
There’s a bunch of storylines, none of which are very memorable. Volchok is the most one-dimensional villain in the show’s history, without a single redeeming quality. He’s just an asshole dirtbag, because the show needs him to be, with nothing deeper going on.
There’s a drawn-out storyline where Seth lies about getting into college, which goes on far too long. All the college stuff feels pointless, because we know they’re not actually going to send the characters to the East Coast permanently.
There’s also a bunch of stuff mid-season that was clearly supposed to set up a spin-off about Kaitlin Cooper at boarding school, which never happened. The way the show ogles Willa Holland, who was literally 14 years old at the time, is fairly gross.
Anyway, finally on to Season 4, which I remember being very into at the time.
The O.C. Season 4 is as good as I remembered. I can’t think of another instance of a TV series bouncing back from some sub-par seasons so successfully.
The big thing they do is to swing the show back towards comedy. There’s still inter-character drama, relationship stuff, etc, but none of the angsty or boring stuff that dragged down the show in the middle seasons. There’s still conflict, but the biggest villains are people like Taylor’s cartoonishly French ex-husband.
They completely ignore the entire season-long storyline of Sandy taking over the family business and just have him back as a lawyer again with no explanation, and Kirsten’s relapse into drinking at the end of S3 is never mentioned. They do take a few episodes to wrap up the storyline around Marissa’s death, and then move on from it entirely.
The show also stops caring too much about logic when it doesn’t matter. Julie Cooper breaks up with her fiancé, Summer’s father, at the start of the season, but her and her daughter Kaitlin just keep living in his house with his daughter, and her friend Taylor moves in too, just because it’s fun to see all of those characters interact.
Autumn Reeser is promoted to the main cast for the final season, and it’s well deserved. Her relationships with all the characters are great, and they even do a decent job of setting her up as a replacement love interest for Ryan, only a few episodes after Marissa’s death in the previous season. Willa Holland’s Kaitlin works slightly less well, just because her being years younger than everyone else means she’s often out on her own without the other main characters.
The new characters they bring in mostly work too. Chris Pratt is great as Ché, Summer’s new hippy activist friend, in the first thing I ever saw him in. His character is fairly similar to his Parks and Rec one, though less dumb. There’s also Gary Grubbs (who I mostly remember as Fred’s dad on Angel), who is delightful as Bullit, an absolute cartoon of a Southern businessman.
Not everything in the season works. The show has the bad luck that one of the only notable black characters happens to be played by future domestic abuser Chris Brown, as a love interest for Kaitlin. The storyline with Kevin Sorbo as Ryan’s father mostly feels like it’s just there because he’s Ryan’s only relation we hadn’t met yet, without any real purpose for Ryan’s arc. Also, a bunch of episodes open with dumb “x hours earlier” cold opens for no reason.
One big thing I’ve realised during this rewatch is how many of my favourite bands and musicians have their music featured on the show. Some of them I listened to before watching, but I’m sure there was definitely a lot of music I got into through the show.
Anyway, super happy I rewatched the show. Even in the weaker seasons I found parts to like, and the good parts absolutely still hold up for me.