The Year Seth Cohen Ruled the Earth
Ted McLoof
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Recently, as part of the marketing for a book of coming-of-age stories I wrote, I was asked to name three TV shows about high school that inspired the book. I stand by my choices—My So-Called Life, Daria, and Freaks and Geeks, the latter of which I consider the best high school show ever made. But when this answer went public, some friends reached out, horrified at a crucial oversight. “How is The O.C. not on there??” one messaged me. “Um…The O.C.? Hello?” said another. “You left off The O.C. during Chrismukkah? Blasphemy,” a third chimed in.
I get it. The O.C. is embedded deeply in the hearts of those who love it, and not in a nostalgia-for-another-time kind of way; we loved it when it was on, when it was cool. I told these friends I left it off because *technically* the characters eventually graduate and go to college, but the truth is this technicality has nothing to do with it. The show got famously bad, sort of bafflingly so, for three quarters of its run, and I couldn’t in good conscience include anything that uneven. But these friends weren’t shocked I left it off the list because of its spotless quality. I know for a fact that they were shocked I left it off because they know about my history with it.
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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 adjective in my vocabulary), above the words “The Bad Boy.”
Clearly, no one knew how to advertise this thing. This dismissive typecasting, 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, 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. The whole thing is led by Peter Gallagher, for god’s sake, known until that point for his intense, slimy turns in Altman films and sex lies and videotape. Rather than a dumb narrative about a wrong-side-of-the-tracks hunk dating the sad rich girl, protagonist 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 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.”).
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It helps that the first episode I ever caught was “The Best Chrismukkah Ever,” season 1 episode 13. The show’s Chrismukkah episodes have been noted for being, if not the best it had to offer, then at least entirely representative of where the show’s quality was in any given season. The first season primarily focused on blue-collar kid Ryan Atwood acclimating to life in wealthy Newport Beach. No, that’s not right. 90210 focused on the Midwestern Minnesota Walshes acclimating to life in posh Beverly Hills. What distinguished The O.C. is that it was about everyone else in Newport Beach acclimating to Ryan. He did not, in the first season at least, need to be tamed or put through finishing school. We discover that everyone in Newport Beach has their secrets and shames and hidden, true selves that they repress to appear flawless to the beautiful people they’re surrounded by. Ryan’s just the only one who’s out in the open about it.
Person by person, Ryan brings out these rich pricks’ humanity (Ryan and Peter Gallagher’s Sandy, the only other character who comes from humble beginnings and refuses to shed them), Tate Donovan’s Jimmy Cooper steals from his wealthy clients but reveals himself to be a dedicated father. Luke Ward is a water polo-playing meathead but gets bullied when his dad is uncloseted. Marissa Cooper is an in-training alcoholic but recognizes the artifice of her mother’s materialism. Summer Roberts is an airhead Valley Girl but has enough of a personality to have a crush on Seth Cohen. Seth, a former outcast, loves Ryan for bringing the whole town down to their level, even if a community like this will never forgive or forget their reputations. “I’m still the kid from Chino who burned a house down,” Ryan says at the end of one episode. “I’m still the girl who OD’d in Mexico,” Marissa follows. “I’m still…” says Seth Cohen, “I’m still Seth Cohen.”
Anyway, Chrismukkah. TV Christmas episodes are such a monotonous staple—or, they were by the beginning of the 21st century, when TV was still a thing—that it’s kind of amazing the show managed to do something different. Seth Cohen, we’re told, created this “uber-holiday” as a child when his Jewish father and goyish mother did not know how to raise him. There’s not much to it (“eight days of presents followed by one day of many presents”), but the episode brings in traditions galore. How cool is it, for instance, that characters receive a Seth Cohen Starter Pack, which includes Shins and Death Cab albums, The Goonies, and a copy of Kavalier and Clay? (Can you imagine references even approaching that level of cool on Dawson’s Creek?). How cool is it that the soundtrack includes Eels, Ben Kweller, Leona Naess, Ron Sexsmith? How great is it that part of their tradition is Chinese food and a viewing of Sylvester Stallone’s 1987 “arm-wrestling classic” Over the Top? How sweet is that final moment when Ryan hangs his own stocking, something we suspect he’s never done in the other seventeen Christmases he’s experienced? How insane is it that it became, I shit you not, a real-life holiday?
How could I not, with this episode as my introduction, become a rabid, lifelong fan?
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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 overstate 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 picked 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. Part of it is actually pretty cool: Josh Schwartz was, at 26, the youngest-ever showrunner and did not know what he was doing, and that’s a good thing, not a bad thing. He has himself admitted that he didn’t know anything about story structure or how to collect ideas in a writers’ room and play them out in the usual slow-burn over a series’ run. The result was that we basically got four seasons’ worth of story in the first year alone. Part of it is that the first season is 27 episodes long—unusually long even for then; that’s nearly three seasons’ worth of any current Netflix show. Part of it was probably Shwarz handing the show over to other people in season two, though he hasn’t exactly left a record of stellar follow-ups in his wake, not enough to convince that he had some sort of magic the show couldn’t live without. 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, at the time the two most-watched blocks of television anywhere, and got its ass handed to it harder than Ryan facing down the water polo team. Part of it is that the young actors reportedly let it all go to their heads (apparently Donovan fucking hated Barton).
Still, though. We’ll always have that first, awesome year. I’m so glad Brody, an effortlessly charming actor, scored cult classics like The Kid Detective and true second-life career revivals like Nobody Wants This. I love how on the nose it is that McKenzie wrote Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud about what shitty people rich young crypto bros can be (a bookseller stuck a post-it note to the cover with the classic Ryan Atwood quote, “You know what I like about rich kids? Nothing!”). 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 those who felt slighted by my omission, I’m watching “The Best Chrismukkah Ever” right now. Let’s all 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. Me, too. Jesus, I’m crying already.
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Ted McLoof teaches English at the University of Arizona. His work has appeared in Kenyon Review, Ninth Letter, Los Angeles Review, The Rumpus, Monkeybicycle, and elsewhere. His first book, Anhedonia, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2022. His latest book, Empty Calories and Male Curiosity: Stories, is now available from Cosmorama.
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