#tbt: The Year Seth Cohen Ruled the Earth

I remember where I was when I first saw ads for The O.C. the same way my parents remember where they were when Kennedy was shot. I’m less belittling a presidential assassination here than I am admitting my own deeply strange connection with (see: bias toward) the series. It was the summer of 2003, right after my freshman year of college, and I was walking with my then-girlfriend through the Palisades Mall. These enormous posters had been hanged everywhere, as omnipresent as American flags on the Fourth of July, with pictures of young beautiful actors I’d never seen nor heard of. They held no indication whatsoever that they were ads for a TV show. Rather, they just had pictures of e.g. Mischa Barton’s face with the words “The Girl Next Door” underneath, or Benajamin McKenzie looking soulful and brooding, Atwood-like (though of course this was not yet an adverb in my vocabulary), above the words “The Bad Boy.”

Clearly, no one knew how to advertise this thing. This dismissive type-casting, wedded with the fact that the show premiered on Fox (home to high school camp-fest 90210) caused prospective viewers to pigeonhole it as just another trashy, WB-style soap. Josh Schwartz and Co. had to fight this stereotype while actively courting it (that’s how they got their initial core audience, after all), and did so brilliantly. Because anyone with any brains who’s seen the show knows that it’s not only very cool and guilty-pleasurable, but also socially conscious and keenly intelligent. Rather than being a dumb narrative about a wrong-side-of-the-tracks hunk dating the sad rich girl, Ryan Atwood suffered from some very real problems. His stepfather beat him in the very first episode, before the credits even rolled. Kirsten Cohen’s reaction to her public defender-husband bringing home a car thief is expertly handled: she’s understandably protective of their son, but also relents to her husband’s do-gooderism: “I’m going to hide my jewelry,” she tells Sandy after their fight, sarcastically. “Where do you think I’m going? He’s going to need clean sheets and a toothbrush.” At one point Seth compares he and Ryan’s friendship to that of the central duo in Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer-prize winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, and he’s dead-on, of course—but more pointedly, it was astonishing to hear references to Pulitzer-winners on a Fox teen TV show.

But I didn’t know any of this about the show yet, because I fell for the stupid advertising Fox had been doing, selling it as Brandon Walsh Part II. I ignored the whole phenomenon—and it was very much a phenomenon—for the first half a season. My girlfriend—seventeen at the time—adored it and watched with a group of her friends every Wednesday, and when I asked her whether it was any good, she told me it Wasn’t My Kind of Thing. But one night in December I was home and there was nothing on and my girlfriend was out (cheating on me somewhere, knowing her), and there were Ryan and Seth, locked in a pool house together and trying to figure their way out. And what struck me the most about the show, what few people mention about it and yet what’s most noticeable on first watch, is that it’s really, really funny. Seth Cohen is the ace in the hole in this regard, never allowing the show to cross the line in to a “telenovela” as he dubs it in one episode. “Everything okay?” Kirsten asks a group of the kids in the season finale, and they all nod until Teresa says, “I’m pregnant.” “Well, except that,” Seth mumbles, just before we hear that familiar piano break out. The show’s humor could sometimes be incredibly broad, as in the occasionally over-the-top jockiness of Luke, or Julie Cooper’s past as a hair-metal groupie. But they dedicate an entire episode to outlining the difference between broad humor and the subtle sarcasm of the Cohen household (when Summer dates Danny, who’s “big, but not funny.” Sandy: “That kid makes Ryan look funny!” Seth: He makes Marissa look funny.”).

I was late to the party but I got there in time, while it was still at its peak. I mentioned before that it was a phenomenon and I can’t understate that case. It exploded; I can’t think of another series that was so short-lived and yet had such a fanatical following during its initial season. People were throwing O.C. parties, for God’s sake, dressing up as the characters, throwing fake cotillions. “Welcome to the O.C., bitch!” became a catch phrase known well beyond the show’s fans. I picked up at least three girls based on our mutual knowledge of certain episodes, and I am not a person who picks up girls often or easily. Entertainment Weekly (correctly) voted world’s greatest parents Sandy and Kirsten as the most believable couple on television—high praise for a teen soap, but absolutely accurate and way touching.

It’s hard to pinpoint how and why the show fell so far and so hard and so quickly from grace. Josh Schwartz handing the show over to other people in season two seems fair, but Josh Schwartz hardly seems like some wunderkind without whom the show would die (compare, if you will, when Greg Daniels left The Office in season five; he left to make the great Parks and Recreation; Josh Schwartz left to make Gossip Girl—gag me). It might be because season one ended with a finality that warrants the end of an entire series rather than a season: Seth sails away to Portland, Ryan leaves to become a father, Marissa hits the bottle hard. Not an easy set of circumstances to come back from. It also moved from Wednesday to Thursday, competing against Survivor and NBC’s Must-See-TV lineup, and got its ass handed to it harder than Ryan facing down the water polo team. But I also think a lot of The O.C.’s fall is due to the through-the-roof expectations; by season two it wasn’t a show but an event, and people who’d never give it a second thought were now paying attention, and hype is a dangerous thing, especially for a show whose strength is in its subtlety.

Still, though. We’ll always have that first, awesome year. The DVD of the first season makes for some compulsive, I-won’t-get-anything-done-for-an-entire-week watching, and even the second season has a gem or two (“The Rainy Day Women” is a lesson unto itself about how to bring a series back from the brink in just forty-two minutes). So in honor of throwback Thursday, throw on a wife-beater, pop on some Death Cab for Cutie, and punch someone in the face. “This year was…” says Ryan, tearfully, at the end of season one. “For us, too,” Kirsten finishes. Us, too. Jesus, I’m crying already.

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