I guess you have to sayThe O.C.series premiere has aged.
The bad dude wears puka shells, they all did back then.
The good dudes bond over PS2, yes this was young male friendship.
Credit: Warner Bros
Rouge hair, rouge lips, outfit teasingly skintone-ish in the evening light.
And the cruelest stylistic decision in the pilotveryof its moment.
Ryan Atwood (Ben McKenzie) begins in Chino, a graffiti cityscape shot handheld and blue-filtered.
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Yet there is beauty in San Bernardino County, and ugliness in Orange County.
So the gritty connotation feels cheap, an indie-film gimmick appropriated to uphold the lamest ideas about postcard Cali.
You notice how Sandy excitedly mentions Ryans SAT scores.
(The 98th percentile!)
This academic excellence, halfway Will Hunting-ish, feels like a very data pipe-TV bit of likability calculus.
Maybe some unexceptional Chino kid wouldnt register the same way; heres a kid whodeservesto live by the beach.
The shift from Chino to Newport feels accurately primal, though, realistic because its so garish.
Getting there takes time, or just piles of money.
Parking is impossible, tourist-unfriendly.
But who gets rich without caring about money?
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Ryans arrival at Casa Cohen is like Dorothy in Oz, the worldliterallymore colorful.
In memory,The O.C.becomes a paragon of conspicuous coastal excess.
Creator Josh Schwartz was always more clever than that.
In his pilot scripts construction, you feel the gleaming walls closing in.
None of the Cohens are happy in Newport.
Sandys a Bronx boy, aware how unreal this real heaven is.
His son Seth (Adam Brody) is a nerdy kid in the land of water polo.
Kirsten (Kelly Rowan) is a local who rebelled against her upbringing.
You always see her wondering:How did I wind up back here?
Next door, there are government agentsknock-knocking, coming for deceitful money-managing dad.
Fabulous daughter Marissa (Mischa Barton) is a casualty drunk.
That hair is harsh on their angles; their chest cant hold up Vera Wang.
(Theres a whole world outside this Newport Beach bubble!
says Sandy, right after his morning surf at the beach down the street.)
The latter point comes through most in this series premiere.
He was who nerds aspired to be, before nerds ever realized they could destroy the world.
But all that would come later.
A pilot cant do everything, of course, but some characters feel half-formed.
Its too precocious, very 90s in itsDawsonian verbosity.
And Summer (Rachel Bilson) is a distant object of Seths affections.
was precisely as nerdy as Seths comic book-ishness.
And I mean that a compliment!
The ensuing heights ofseason 1were very high, a full 27 episodes (27!)
A couple moments from season 2 are historic.
The vibes unmissably Luke-ish,Welcome To The OC, Bitch!as a blatant (successful!)
attempt at summer TV eyeballs.
The best was yet to come.
But it achieves full transcendence near the end, when Sandy drives Ryan away.
Joseph Arthurs on the soundtrack, Honey and the Moon.
Marissas on the street.
The two teens share a long look.
Impossible to conceive that either of them know who Joseph Arthur is.
Ryan looks back, and we catch one last sight: Marissa, getting into some guys car.
In some ways, she never got out.
