By Ryan McGowan
I’ve been humming the same bars of music for weeks now. If I knew anything about notes and melodies, I could easily play it on a piano. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night, mindlessly flubbing unintelligible lyrics, but the song is always the same.
The theme song for The O.C., probably the most addictive television show I’ve ever seen, and certainly one of only two that I watch regularly (the other being The Apprentice), that is, if you don’t count the occasional episode of Dance 360 or the Late Night options from HBO On Demand.
I didn’t watch the show last year, instead choosing to eavesdrop on others’ alien conversations about Ryan, Marissa, Seth, Summer, and Luke. They talked about how much of a bitch Julie Cooper was, and how much she deserved Caleb. They were sad when Anna left, and then when Luke left, and cried at the season finale. I thought they were all insane.
Until I watched the show myself. Over an approximately three week span, I watched all 27 episodes of the first season. (For the record, I am a huge fan of the current “Season One DVD” trend in entertainment.) One Saturday, Jen and I watched eleven episodes in a row. I was apparently either hopelessly addicted or positively a loser. Truth be told, I’m probably a little bit of both when it comes to The O.C.
In tribute to the first season of the show, I’ve compiled some thoughts on the first 27 episodes. Here’s my list of my favorite aspects of The O.C. from Season 1:
The Ryan-Luke friendship development. Years ago, I realized the essentially dividing dynamic between men and women when it came to fighting. Women fight, and hold grudges for 30 years. Men fight, and two minutes later they are best friends again. They just needed to get it out of their system. Nowhere is this more evident than in the Luke-Ryan dynamic. Probably the first five or six times we saw these two together, they were either fighting each other, threatening to fight, or burning down model homes. Then all of a sudden they are best friends, riding around in Oliver’s golf cart and hanging out in a softball dugout, commiserating about Luke finding out his father was gay. Did anyone else notice that Luke, supposedly captain of the football team, also coincidentally played the same position as Ryan on the soccer team? Does Harbor Prep allow its football players to play on other teams at the same time? Maybe this is the reason why they have never been able to beat Mater Dei or De La Salle and get on ESPN2.
Luke’s near-seamless transition to friendship with Marissa. This one I couldn’t figure out. Luke dates Marissa for years, fights the new kid in town for her, takes her virginity, and then loses her to his arch-enemy. Suddenly, he’s boys with Ryan and Seth, and hanging out with the entire group as if the two of them never dated. I know kids in high school have short memories, but this is ridiculous. Granted, Luke and Marissa’s relationship had about as much substance as a teaspoon of Jello, but even for two superficial twits, they still would have needed a more substantial “cooling off” period before they were able to be functional as friends. The writers dropped the ball on this one.
The apparent lack of any potential dating partners outside the main cast. The show allegedly takes place in California, but the principal characters seem more like they grew up in Arkansas. Come on… there have to be other eligible people out there in Newport Beach! To start, Kirsten and Jimmy Cooper were high school sweethearts. 20 years later, Kirsten’s foster son dates Jimmy’s daughter, while Jimmy’s ex-wife is fornicating in the Mermaid Inn with her daughter’s ex-boyfriend. Meanwhile, Jimmy is secretly hooking up with Kirsten’s 24-year-old sister whom he used to babysit, presumable when he was 17 and she was 4. To complete this love Geodesic dome, Jimmy’s ex-wife stops sleeping with Luke to marry her neighbor’s father, whose daughter is now sleeping with Julie’s ex-husband. I am about to pass out after writing that last paragraph. Aren’t there any other people in California? It’s the biggest state in the country, for God’s sake. There hasn’t been this much in-breeding since a Hazzard County reunion.
Kirsten and Caleb, and mixing family with work. Take this as a warning to all you potential heirs to the family business out there: mixing family with work is a dicey proposition at best. Especially when you are a wannabe-rebel and know your father is a scumbag, but you lack the stones to stand up to him because you are too much of a princess to give up the posh country-club life his real estate empire has created for you. Some of my favorite awkward scenes are when Sandy sarcastically insults his father-in-law, thus triggering a heated argument, and ultimately ending with Caleb insisting, “This is MY house; I built it!” What is the comeback to that? Caleb is entirely correct, in a business sense. Sandy and Kirsten would have to give up their comfortable, exotic life of ease to stand up for their ideals. Just once, however, I’d love to see Sandy come back with, “Maybe so, Cal… but I’ve been banging your daughter for the past 20 years.” Maybe in the series finale.
Everyone’s a MILF. I was watching one of the later episodes with someone who hadn’t seen the show before, and I was trying to point out the impossible-to-explain dynamics, but this guy kept mixing up Kirsten and Marissa, and Summer and Julie, etc. What place except for the O.C. could you find 40-year-old women who are indistinguishable from their teenage daughters? The Asian kid from American Pie would have a field day on this show. Quite a changeover from the old days of TV, where, for instance, no one would ever have mistaken Becky Connor for Roseanne, or Norma Arnold on The Wonder Years with the hippie older sister. It’s no wonder that Marissa and her mother have issues with each other, when they have been essentially competing for the same men for years. It was only a matter of time before one or the other (or both) started sleeping with Luke. I am waiting for the Cinemax premiere of the first season that shows Marissa, Julie, and Luke having a threesome at the Mermaid Inn, when Ryan and Theresa accidentally burst in their room and join the party.
Best episode: Vegas Trip. When I watched this episode, I wanted to re-watch it at least four or five times. In fact, watching this episode motivated me to make preliminary plans to return to the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino, where I spent a blissful four days in the summer of 2003. To me, this episode captured the magic of all that is Vegas. The impeccable Hard Rock pool, complete with floating blackjack tables, stunningly topless women, and the occasional UNLV prostitute coed made me rather nostalgic. We also learned in this episode that somehow Ryan is a champion no-limit Texas Hold `Em player. My question is, if Ryan is such a great poker player, why not capitalize on this in future episodes? Maybe in season two, the writers will have Ryan bust up some high-stakes backroom games in Hollywood, maybe even show some classic cameos of C-list celebrities like Brian Austin Green and Kieran Culkin losing their shirts to Ryan. Maybe he even goes back to Chino to play in some of the games there, going heads-up with Eddie (Theresa’s former fiance) with the loser going to jail, and have Ryan go all-in on a stone-cold bluff. The poker craze is sweeping the nation, and the O.C. should definitely call this one.
Jimmy Cooper: Likeable, or Loser? Jennifer and I disagree on this one, and I am sure many viewers fluctuate. I always felt sorry for Jimmy, but in a good way. He strikes me as an essentially nice guy who made some really bad choices, but was pressured by the stifling, unforgiving society of Newport (and his bitch of a wife). Jen has always thought he was a pathetic and weak character. I do think he is pathetic (although somehow he managed to score with uber-babe Hailey Nichol), but I kind of have a soft spot for a guy who puts his family and other people ahead of his own interests. It’s really rare in Newport Beach; apparently the list of decent human beings in that section of the world is confined to the central cast of the show. These people — Jimmy, Ryan, Sandy, Seth, Anna, Kirsten, Luke, Summer, to a certain extent Marissa — seem to have some sense of human decency. Everyone else basically comes off as one-dimensional carbon copies of Julie Cooper and Caleb Nichol.
One of my rules of writing is once I find myself moralizing over a TV soap opera drama, it is time to finish the article and re-evaluate my life. Before I do that, though, I have to catch up on episodes 1-3 of season 2. California, here we come, right back where we started from, Californiaaaaaaaaaa…………………
