Thoughts on The O.C.

Yesterday I completed my month-and-a-half long trip through every episode of the four seasons of The O.C. It started as a project to keep me amused and semi-distracted while I wrote my end-of-term papers (when I'm reading, I basically need instrumental music, but when I'm writing, I can have just about anything going on) and I think that I underestimated how much time it would take, but it was ultimately satisfying. I watched from Ryan stealing the car with Trey 1.0 straight through until the final scene, when he's an architect of indeterminate age offering help to another wayward youth. I laughed, I cried, I cringed. There are certainly worse ways to spend one's time.

It was interesting to watch all of the episodes in one go, rather than a week at a time. At some point, I told my mother what I was watching, and she asked whether it was one of the bad seasons. One of the things I realized is that the show's strengths and failings remained fairly consistent over its run. The first season was probably the most effortless, but it also had the noteworthy drawback of the Oliver storyline, marking a trend that would continue throughout the show's run. (The Television Without Pity recap of the third season finale makes this point unbelievably well - they continued to reference Oliver in a winky, meta way like "Wow, that was a disaster, huh?" while introducing new characters who served in exactly the same capacity.) The show was schizophrenically paced from beginning to end, and the central cast was never big enough for the show to have much longetivity. Actors who worked well with the central cast (notably Chris Carmack, Samaire Armstrong and Michael Cassidy) had their characters tossed aside alongside those that didn't (nearly every new young character who got added for the second and third seasons). Still, it was fantastically quippy from beginning to end, and the chemistry among the main cast was unbeatable. Seeing ads for Southland, I've been genuinely excited to see Ben McKenzie back on my TV. Also, Josh Schwartz's post-O.C. projects have shown a degree of learning from the past and taking the best of The O.C. forward to the pop-culture hyper-awareness of Chuck and the soapy melodrama of Gossip Girl.

I'll end with the classic montage from the series finale. A lot of what led up to that point had been kind of crazy and detached from what made the show great, but this flash-forward was grounded in the emotional heart of the show. I tear up every time I see Seth and Summer getting married.