Review of The O.C.

The O.C. was yet another program susceptible to the hype, and by the beginning of the second season, had used in almost predictive repetition pretty much any dramatic ploy the writers could conjure up to lure audiences into a Thursday night with the Cohens and friends. But, the audience is primarily composed of teenage and twenty-something females who were drawn to the show specifically for its unsophisticated teeny bopper qualities and exaggerations, I'm not sure why the show's creators try so hard and, having done so, they near completely nullified the effectiveness of the few good actors on the show (namely, the Cohen parents). By the end of the third season, the show had become almost as trite and insipid as an episode of Seventh Heaven that even those characters who were initially interesting (Seth, for example) had become just as irritating as the rest (although, I would say Rachel Bislon's character Summer, although originally an annoying character rose in the ranks of tolerability despite the rest of the young castmates). In the end, I have to wonder, what kind of bad mojo the people of Newport were playing with, because they seem to have bad karma at every turn that make the victimized female leads of Lifetime's made-for-TV movies seem like a paradise. Why would anyone want to even hang around them? Everything that even seems remotely good suddenly takes a nose dive into something that either ends in swimming pool fist fights before a crowd of stunned, and formally dressed, onlookers, or it will end with a jail term, death, or some kind out to avoid any of those fates. I guess Marissa was right when she told Ryan in the first episode that he could get in less trouble had he stayed in Chino.

Although I had higher expectations for the show by the middle of the second season, if the entire third season is any indicator, expect more of the same.