This month marks the 10 year anniversary of the premier of The O.C. This particular anniversary struck me because unlike the majority of television where I have very little in common with the lives of characters, my experience watching The O.C. was as a high school student watching a high school drama. Sure, I also watched other teen shows around the same time, but unlike any other teen drama I know of, I am the exact same age as the characters on The O.C. and that makes it special.
So I feel as though I should have something to say about this anniversary. Something more than, “it came, we saw it, it conquered melodrama.” But despite so many interesting things the show accomplished, so much influence it’s had on pop culture, my primary reaction is to think “wow, we’re old.”
To my mind, The O.C. was a turning point in teen drama. Of course there’s a bit of a grey area when it comes to shows that overlapped it, chronologically speaking, but in general I see a huge shift in the style and focus in teen drama in the U.S. following this show. In the before category we get My So-Called Life and Buffy, Dawson’s Creek and the first half of Gilmore Girls (the good, High School bits). In the after category we get Gossip Girl, “reality” shows about teens, a flashy remake of 90210, and Pretty Little Liars.
Painting with broad brush strokes, The O.C. re-introduced audiences to rich, privileged characters, and demonstrated how far television has travelled since the moralizing days of Brandon Walsh’s speeches about the dangers of drugs. The O.C. showed us how fun it could be to watch wave after wave of drama crash over these privileged characters’ lives. It gave us scandal at a fast pace, with just enough humour, self-awareness, and actually sympathetic characters to avoid turning into an obnoxious series about selfish, rich dicks.
So while the “before” picture is full of a lot of really neat series with interesting characters, and slower-paced drama based primarily on interpersonal relationships, the “after” is more about rich people doing drugs and sleeping around, drinking and screwing each other over.
Of course this is a huge generalization, and part of this comes from my personal lack of interest in a lot of the new shows of the past decade. But I think a lot of the shows that followed after The O.C. just picked up on the wrong things; the things I didn’t mind originally because the show was doing so much more to entertain me, but not the things I really care about. They wanted to take away some of its success, and instead picked up a little extra shallowness.
I think it’s the shows like Awkward that succeed in attracting my attention best in this post-O.C. teen TV landscape. Dropping the trend of rich, independent young people, Awkward went with the legacy of witty outcast cracking wise while high school tropes float by. Because this is where The O.C. really succeeded. Sure it was dramatic, but it was never as serious as a show like Dawson’s Creek. We need shows like this that emphasize the comedic moments in high school, and demonstrate a self awareness about the genre and pop culture context in which they find themselves.
Because while “rich people melodrama” is one of the easiest things to remember about The O.C. it is certainly not the most important, and certainly not what made it a good show. In my mind, it all comes down to characters and relationships that the audience can’t help caring about. Good story-telling can only do so much with jerks.
