One of my favorite shows in middle school was The O.C. on WB. I was absolutely addicted to the show and I swore I would marry Ryan Attwood one day. The characters were so perfect and, of course, I wanted to be just like them. I was so sad when the series ended, what was I supposed to do without The O.C.?! Despite what I may have thought, I lived.
This semester, I discovered that every episode of my middle school craze was online. Well, I decided to re-watch every single episode of the series for this assignment. I wanted to bring back all the happiness, drama, and emotion I felt when I watched it before. Little did I know; it would never be the same as it was in my younger years.
I started off with Pilot in season one. My first reaction was "What are they wearing?" forgetting the show was six years old. As I went through the season, I realized that all of the drama and cattiness was seriously disturbing. In the first couple of episodes, one of the main characters is at a party and drinks herself into a state of oblivion. Her best friends take her home but instead of taking her inside her house and making sure she is okay, they leave her on the doorstep. This was jaw-dropping. I'm sorry, but if my best friends did that to me, they would no longer be my friends. The characters are very catty and only really care about themselves and how situations will affect them.
However, once you get past the annoying bad manners, you get sucked into the relationship drama and fighting. The main character, Ryan Atwood, is attracted to Marissa Cooper (previously mentioned drunk girl). But, Marissa has a boyfriend named Luke. I really just don't like him because he's the "popular" kid and has way too big of an ego for his own good. He's a cheater and a liar, and he's not even good looking. But, I guess you have to have one of those in every good television series. When I was watching the series, I kept thinking, "Oh, no she didn't," and, "if that ever happened to me..." But the truth is, none of this stuff would actually happen. In the first season, Marissa's mom has an affair with Luke. Honestly, what rich, pretty mother has to cheat on her rich boyfriend with her teenage daughter's ex boyfriend? It's just unrealistic when you actually step back and look at the situations the town is put in.
As the season progressed, I realized that the way the roles of the characters were building up was actually kind of true and realistic. Although the situations they go through aren't practical, the way the characters grow from them is. For example, in episode 18, The Truth, high school student Marissa is held hostage in a penthouse and her ex boyfriend comes to her rescue right before the trigger on the gun was pulled. Convenient, right? Well, we obviously know that would probably never happen, but Marissa and Ryan actually use it as a way to become more mature and realize how much they care about each other. It makes them stronger throughout the season and their relationship blossoms. This is only one situation I saw in the first season that helped the characters grow, among many.
All in all, I realized after watching the first season of The O.C. that I probably shouldn't have tried to bring back the feelings I had in my pre-teen/early teen years. This show is amazing when you are only in middle school, but once you are grown up and in college, it's not quite the same. I'm not saying that I don't like the show anymore, all I'm saying is that after watching the first season, I have realized that it isn't as jaw-dropping and pragmatic as I had originally thought. I was slightly disappointed in my future husband and his fellow cast members' first season of my previously-favorite show.
Kicking off the second season of The O.C. is the struggle to get Ryan and Seth back to Newport one week before school starts back up. In the first season I was anxious to find out if Seth and Ryan went back to Newport and it seemed like it took forever for them to tell you in the episode. However, the way they return to their home was shocking. Instead of Sandy convincing Seth to come back, Ryan and Seth convince each other in a way. Ryan goes to visit Seth so he can tell him to move back home and Seth says he isn't going unless Ryan goes with him. They end up going together and I thought it turned out to be one of the better episodes of the entire show because it was one of the only episodes that exhibited actual feelings instead of adding a lot of unneccesary drama. The love the family shared is what brought them back together in the end.
Okay, in this season, there is a lot of drama packed into each episode. The first couple of episodes of this season depressed me because Marissa and Ryan are no longer together and he is moving on to this other girl Lindsay. Ugh! Anyways, that's not the only couple that's frustrating. Seth starts dating Alex who later turns out to be a lesbian and dates Marissa Cooper. If that's not enough to make the show completely dramatic for you, don't worry, that's not even half of it. It's absolutely insane. When I was watching this season, my jaw was on the floor, my eyes were wide, and my curiosity was aroused.
Crazy stuff starts happening mid-season that came as a huge shock to me. I never would've expected Lindsay to be Caleb's daughter. I was like, "Woah! That really just happened?!" And yes, it did. After the whole Christmakuh thing, I was thinking, "Anything they try to pull of now is going to be lame and cliche." Boy, was I wrong. The writers of The O.C. were pulling things out that none of the fans would ever think would happen on the show. Season two was an extremely shocking season for all.
I'm not going to say that my childhood feelings for The O.C. came back, but I was definitely more sucked into the drama and atmosphere of the show with the second season. It was probably my favorite season because all of the characters were changing, the settings were better than the first, and the soundtrack was absolutely amazing. I believe one of the most important parts of viewing something is something as a small as the musical stylings of the episodes. They found songs that were very audience-appropriate while also adding to the effect of the storyline which is hard to do.
We continue the adventures of Marissa, Ryan, Seth, Summer, and the rest of the cast in the third season of The O.C.. All of the cast members return for a great third season that is filled with even more drama and excitement. The third season was not as good as the second season, but was much better than the fourth season. When I watched the third season, I was shocked, but also tired of all the drama and pettiness of the characters.
The first episode of the season picked up where season two left off. Marissa, Ryan, Seth, and Summer are getting ready to go into their senior year of high school and it is very hard for them to forget about Trey getting shot. This ends up staying with Marissa throughout the season. At first I was rather annoyed with the fact that he writers wouldn't let it go, but then I realized that they are trying to teach a lesson within the series. If something like that actually happened in your life, you wouldn't be able to forget about it or just move on. Something like that stays in a person's life forever and affects a lot of things they do. Marissa getting kicked out of school is very realistic because she attended a very prestigious private school which didn't accept people who were "troubled".
Once the season got rolling, more and more drama came up. Kirsten was in rehab and ended up meeting a woman named Charlotte. I had a bed feeling about her form the very beginning because she just had a manipulative look about her the whole time. I was correct. All she wanted to do was con the Cohen family and take their money. This actually happens a lot of the time to wealthy people. The writers of the series are trying to bring this to the attention of more people by putting it in the show.
More drama occurs in public school with Marissa. After getting kicked out of Harbor, she attends Newport Union. What she goes through on the first day is the stereotypical first day of a new school. She is bullied by the "popular" girl and then some cute boy comes and savse her. It's extremely cliche and everyone knows something is going to start happening with the cute boy. Well, he ends up killing himself because he's in love with Marissa but Marissa is in love with Ryan. Yet another horrid thing happens to Marissa involving death. I really think she needs to stop getting herself into situations like this. Just play it safe for a while.
The whole gang is focusing on college throughout this season. Ryan thinks about attendind Berkeley and Summer is attending Brown. Seth didn't get into Brown but pretends he did so he can stay with Summer. It ends up coming out that he didn't get accepted, obviously, and he looks at his other options near Brown. Marissa blows off finishing her application and finds it too hard to complete her essay because of the recent events. All of these are realistic experiences that college seniors go through with the exception of Seth lying about getting into an Ivy League University. I don't think I really understood the stress and everything they were going through senior year until I watched it again this year because I hadn't been through situations like that.
Season three of The O.C. isn't one of the most reaslistic seasons in the world, but it definitely has some realistic aspects incorporated into it. Some of the feelings and experiences the characters go through are real and some people may even be able to relate to them. The show could use a few touch-ups and changes made to the script in order to make it a lot better, but it is still something people can enjoy.
The drama stays alive for one last season of The O.C. with the same main characters and the same problems. The only thing that is different is the fact that the Ryan, Marissa, Seth, and Summer are all high school graduates. Gathering what we know from the first three seasons, we expect this season to be pretty similar with all of the kids going to their selected schools and living their lives while falling more and more in love with each other every day. However, the writers of this season decided to throw us a twist.
After graduation, none of the past problems go away, which is pretty realistic because your problems don't just leave unless you find a way to solve them. Marissa is killed in a car accident involving a past boy-toy she had and we all hated. He was the typical bad boy with a troubled past that thought he was better than everyone and would fight anyone that thought otherwise. Well anyways, the rest of the season is basically the cast coping with the loss of their best friend.
I personally thought this season was the worst. I do not know if it was the writers getting lazy, or not caring, or not being creative. Whatever it was, I hated it. All of the characters did the same thing in every episode which is exactly like the rest of the series except this season, what they did was boring. They moped, they tried to get revenge, they cried. It just did not do the show justice.
Another thing I did not like about this season was the character change Summer went through. It was completely realistic because she lost her best friend and went off to college so the personality change was probably not far from the reality reach, but I liked the bubbly, optimistic Summer so I was not a fan of the writers' decision to make her a tree-hugging environmentalist. I'm not saying there is anything wrong with people like that, but for a girl that only wears designer and says "EWW!!" at the slightest thing, that was a bit too much of achange for me. Rachel Bilson did do a good job of playing the part though. It was pretty believable so I guess she was doing something right.
Overall, this season of The O.C. was not as good as the rest in my opinion. I feel that it was because there was no petty drama which is what I thought annoyed me, but it was actually what made me keep watching the show. Apparently, I was so obsessed with their rich-people lifestyles that when they changed, I wanted nothing to do with them. I still do not like how some of the parts of the series are too drama-filled and fake. But, through all of the crazyness, the writers are actually trying to teach us a few things about life. You don't realize this as a 12 year old girl in middle school, but when you step back and watch it again when you have learned a thing or two, you realize it is so much more than you expected.