Right Back Where We Started From
What I would do to go back in time and watch The O.C. when dresses over jeans was called fashion
Paris Hilton’s peak. Death Cab for Cutie’s mainstream breakthrough. Low-rise jeans, halter tops, glossy lips and flip phones.
These relics of the past are just part of what has made The O.C. a time capsule of the early 2000s. The Fox show first hit screens in 2003 and became an overnight sensation, launching its cast into stardom and changing the future of teen dramas forever. The show burned bright and fast, with the later seasons unable to maintain the pace and style — but that first season is a near perfect debut.
Last month, The O.C. celebrated its 20th anniversary. Watching the show decades later feels a lot like watching it with the biggest spoiler of all time: The show became a cultural phenomenon. The fact that this month marks the last of Netflix DVDs has me thinking a lot about how much the meaning of watching television has changed. Shows like The O.C. have been picked apart on Reddit, turned into enough YouTube edits to keep you busy for centuries, and overshadowed by the reveal of behind-the-scenes drama and cast interviews in the decades to follow. We’re now worlds away from what it would have felt like to gather around the television weekly at 9 pm — snacking on Pop-Tarts and Go-Gurts and flipping through Us Weekly and InStyle’s stories about Mischa Barton being the “it girl” of the moment — anxiously awaiting the new episode.
Yes, the storylines were sometimes ridiculous, including when everyone acted like Seth was derailing his life with a drug addition after he smoked *checks notes* two joints. Or like when Johnny fell off a cliff and died and everyone cared for 1.5 hours. But in many ways, the show still holds up. It kicked off with troubled teen Ryan Atwood being adopted by Sandy Cohen — Ryan’s public defender — and his family. Sandy’s son Seth is seemingly the opposite of bad boy Ryan: a geeky loner who has been in love with popular girl Summer Roberts since the fifth grade, but has never spoken to her. Ryan’s life quickly becomes intertwined with the Cohens, their beautiful nextdoor neighbor (and Summer’s best friend) Marissa Cooper, and a large cast of characters in Orange County’s affluent town of Newport Beach, California. The show had a rotating cast of guest stars from Olivia Wilde to Chris Pratt to three Pretty Little Liars and seemingly the entire casts of Twilight and The Vampire Diaries (I counted two Cullens and one of the many hot vamps obsessed with killing Bella in one episode alone).
When The O.C. aired, I was too young to watch. In fact, the first time I can remember the show entering my consciousness was when it was referenced on the Nickelodeon show Unfabulous1. But its influence seeped into the culture so deeply that I felt its presence (ex. I begged for UGGs that my dog would eventually eat like every other girl in town after Marissa Cooper made them cool again). When the show won “Choice Breakout TV Show” at the 2004 Teen Choice Awards, I’m not sure anyone could have understood yet just how much of a breakthrough The O.C. would be for the teen drama genre.
Taking aspects of shows like Beverly Hills, 90210 and Dawson’s Creek, The O.C. centered on the trials and tribulations of being a teenager, but it also gave life and full character arcs to the parents. Shows like Gossip Girl (which is the show The O.C. creator Josh Schwartz went on to develop next) and eventually Euphoria followed its lead in this way. It’s also been praised for popularizing the geeky heartthrob thanks to Adam’s Brody performance as Seth, who reflected anyone who liked comic books and indie music and felt like an outsider. As someone who, like Summer, could have confused Lord of the Rings for being just a mountain-top gay love story but whose type is hot nerd, this is my culture. We can thank The O.C. for the Real Housewives franchise, Laguna Beach and The Hills, as well as the SNL parody “Dear Sister” that most people didn’t even realize had to do with The O.C. and that perfectly encapsulates millennial humor and YouTube culture around the time.
Watching the show for the first time in 2023, I knew the actors I was watching on screen — frozen in time — didn’t know just how big The O.C. would be. I could look for the roots of its influence in every episode. I also knew what was to come, like the rise and fall of Mischa Barton after she was booted from the show. As Rachel Bilson (who played Summer) said on an episode of her O.C. rewatch podcast, Barton was the heart of the show. Her character was done dirty over and over again, and her acting was perhaps not going to get her an Emmy (cue the infamous pool scene) but she, alongside Ben McKenzie’s Ryan, were the glue that kept the crew together. Still, it was hard to appreciate this when my watching experience included breaks for Youtube-ing interviews in which the show’s creator basically confirmed that he didn’t like Barton and said the actress wasn’t trying to leave the show despite her saying she left because she was bullied. Barton went on to be pummeled by the press à la Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears. Now that we’re reckoning with the paparazzi treatment of the “party girls” of the early 2000s, we’ve entered another cycle of discourse, exemplified by Adam Brody vehemently defending Barton and condemning her abrupt exit from the series on the rewatch podcast in 2021. And all this before I had even streamed season three.
Thanks to years of The O.C. being weaved into most conversations about the evolution of teen dramas, I already knew that the storyline in which new kid Oliver comes between Marissa and Ryan was hated by fans, and eventually regretted by the showrunner. I knew that “The Rainy Day Women” was an all-time favorite episode and that Brody improvised a lot of his scenes and has since said he gets too much credit for this.2 When I found Seth — the fan’s overall favorite character at the time thanks to his wit, humor and cute pining after Summer — to not actually be a perfect boyfriend at all, I found thought piece after thought piece already tearing apart his character. At least when I was sick of Seth and Summer fighting, I could take to Instagram to find a perfectly edited video of all their cutest scenes as a little break.
Minimizing my HBO tab and searching for behind-the-scenes insight and TV criticism became a bit of a crutch when it was hard to get through seasons three and four, which were critically flamed and have taken away from The O.C.'s legacy. The third season is downright depressing and even the lighter scenes felt muted. The show tried to reinvent itself in the fourth season, using a main character’s sudden death to discuss grief but also dipping into comedy, and transforming its self-awareness into self-deprecation that was so over the top it basically just pointed out all the show’s flaws without any humor. These seasons almost ruined the show for me, or at least ensured any rewatches would stop after season two, mostly because viewers before me on Reddit picked apart the cast’s comments to deduce that the majority of the younger actors had been over the show by then. I could have handled poor acting, but a bad attitude is harder to forgive.
I felt a sense of nostalgia that bordered on melancholy about not being able to enjoy this show in its heyday, back when Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson’s Nipplegate was just around the corner, and we hadn’t yet heard the song “Hey There Delilah.” Even if I had hated the last two seasons, I would have at least had comradeship in the other viewers and critics.
While it was nice to be able to binge The O.C., I longed for a cliffhanger, or to relish in a joke in all its glory, like when Summer’s dad leaves to work at a “quirky” hospital called Seattle Grace just when Grey’s Anatomy was getting buzz. I wanted to feel the excitement viewers must have felt hearing Matt Pond’s “Champagne Supernova” cover play for the first time over Seth and Summer’s upside-down Spiderman kiss shortly after Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst did the original. I imagined witnessing their relationship and enjoying meta jokes (like Summer asking a teen drama actor if him dating his co-star would ruin their show) all while tabloid story after tabloid story came out about Bilson and Brody’s real-life, off-screen romance that went on for most of filming3. Sure, some of those jokes might have gone over my head if I couldn’t hit the 10 second rewind button, like the fact that Summer goes to prom with a member of made-up band Big Korea while the real Adam Brody was in a band called Big Japan. But watching Marissa’s tragic death in real time, surrounded by friends weeping to Imogen Heap… that would have been my Super Bowl, years before Taylor Swift made football something I might pretend to care about.
This longing to go back in time to enjoy a piece of media at its peak is not uncommon — and it’s something Rachel and I deal with all the time thanks to our bright idea of torturing ourselves with one million rewatches for this newsletter. But it’s also why we love television so much in the first place: The screen can capture a time and place for us forever. Juicy tracksuits will always live on, thanks to the ups and downs of the Newport Beach crew.
B Plot
Question: What’s the most devastating piece of dialogue from a television show?
Mallika: One scene that has stuck with me since I watched it at least a year ago is when Alex’s abusive ex Sean (played by Nick Robinson) gives away the car Alex (Margaret Qualley) has been using in Maid. In other words, he takes away her only means of getting away from him. Hearing her say “I’m so stupid” while she’s breaking down is a gut punch every time. Here’s the scene, but it definitely comes with a trigger warning. On a lighter note, I know everyone jokes about this poolside White Lotus scene in which two teenagers played by Sydney Sweeney and Brittany O'Grady eviscerate Alexandra Daddario’s character Rachel with a few simple questions and some vocal fry, but it should also be noted. What’s more devastating than trying to impress teenagers?
Rachel: I don’t think anyone has gotten over the “I love you” and “It’ll pass” exchange between Phoebe Waller Bridge and Andrew Scott in the season two finale of Fleabag, but the dialogue I think about more often comes in episode four, when the show flashes back to Fleabag’s mother’s funeral. She tells her best friend Boo, who we all know later gets trampled to death by cyclists, “I don’t know what to do with it. With all the love I have for her. I don’t know where to put it now.” And Boo says, “I’ll take it.” Fleabag laughs, but Boo says, “No, I’m serious. It sounds lovely. I’ll have it. You’ve got to give it to me. It’s got to go somewhere.” It’s such a lovely look at grief and even more heartbreaking knowing what happens to Boo. The flashback scene is intentionally intertwined with the present — Fleabag’s blooming relationship with Scott’s priest. Her love has to go somewhere and she’s found someone else worthy of it. But I like to think that in that final “It’ll pass” scene, as Alabama Shakes’ Britany Howard croons “I know I’m gonna be alright” and we see Fleabag clutching the golden torso Olivia Coleman sculpted in her mother’s image, and by proxy, her own image, she’s directing that love inward.
C Plot
The writers strike is over, people! Which hopefully means all those wonderfully competent writers can sit the production companies down in a room and convince them that making a bomb ass season two of Severance is a better use of their time than rebooting uhhh The Office?? We know Space Force didn’t land the way Greg Daniels wanted it to but we’re sure there’s some happy medium between Dunder Mifflin and NASA. All we ask is that Mike Schur leaves Parks and Rec out of this because Adam Scott is busy doing God’s work!! Plus, John Krasinski survived divorce summer with his marriage in tact, but will his Jack Ryan sized ego survive a season of leaning way too far back in that office chair and smirking at the camera? Only time will tell, but the only reboot that feels necessary right now is no doubt saved as a draft in Shonda Rhimes’ notes app after she saw this red carpet photo.
Anyway, if you want to know how the SAG strike is affected by the end of the WGA strike, here’s a good breakdown.
We’re not sure about the rest of her performance, but let’s just fork over the Emmy for Kim Kardashian’s line delivery of “If your face looks like a fucking cat’s asshole every minute of the day, no one’s gonna watch it win an Oscar.” As someone pointed out on Twitter, this is very Kim-yelling-at-Kourtney coded — and that’s why it’s magnifique!
The Kim and Kourtney feud may be alive and well but Stacy London and Clinton Kelly are friends again! The reality TV dream team behind TLC’s What Not to Wear have ended their decade-long feud and they’re going on tour together now to give fashion advice to the masses, confirming everyone’s greatest fear… late 2000s fashion is coming back. Their tour website taunts, “If you feel like coming dressed as a WNTW mannequin from back in the day (structured jacket, printed blouse, dark-wash-mid-rise-straight-leg jean, pointy-toe shoe and statement necklace), we would not hate it.” Oh sweetie, we would though.
For the life of me, I can’t find more than a passing note on this reference deep in a Reddit thread. Someone please tell me you know what I’m talking about so I don’t have to rewatch Unfabulous after bashing on Emma Roberts last week.
*Rachel’s note* What a way to find out Kevin Pollak has an ~Inside the Actor’s Studio~ vibe chat show in which he is always wearing a fedora. How come none of you told me about this?
We don’t make jokes about Seth Cohen being married to Blair Waldorf in this house solely because of Leighton Meester’s face nine seconds into this video when asked about it.
I’m reading this on the Acela as the girl across the aisle from me is eating chipotle and watching the O.C. on her iPad 👀