My story on the finale of The O.C. was cut from 2,500 words to about 1,000. Here are the outtakes; the rest of the article was just published here.It may be inevitable that all ensemble cast prime-time dramas about the lives of wealthy teens in Southern California be compared to 90210, but The O.C. would seem to share more with its FOX ancestor than the obvious lifestyle porn trappings. For one thing, 90210 was it's own kind of "trojan horse". As Crystal Kile describes at length in the online journal Bad Subjects, what keeps Aaron Spelling's masterpiece grounded in fantasy is that, though it pretended to be about ordinary teens living in an extraordinary community, in practice, it used its contemporary teenager protagonists as vehicles for a very Baby boomer-specific nostalgia, for a time in which Southern California represented a sunny, upper-middle-class utopia, free of pre-millennial tension and late-20th-century social blight. As Kile puts it, "the popular genius of 90210 is that while it is superficially topical-n-relevant ... it also evinces a deep, yet blank 'nostalgia for the 'kinder, gentler,' 'California youth-cult mythos' of the late 1950s and early 1960s., nostalgia for the myth of Southern California as paradise for Midwestern WASPs, as Gidget-land, as Disneyland."
That type of nostalgia is all over The O.C. It's there in the show's theme song, a non-ironic ode to sun and surf called "California" by the band Phantom Planet. It's there in the character of Seth's dad, Sandy, a Brooklyn Jew who followed his idealism to Berkeley, only to fall in love with the heiress of a real estate mogul and find himself ensnared in the Orange County elite. Sandy is often seen returning to the Cohen mansion still in his wetsuit after an early morning surf in the Pacific; surfing, he says, is his only respite from his apparently soul-crushing existence living off his wife's fortune. Maybe most of all, that mid-century nostalgia is present in the very plot device that allows the Cohen's ad-hoc family to come together: what could be more in line with "Gidget-land" idealism than the idea that a juvenile delinquent is really a good, smart person who has simply been dealt a bad hand in life, and who can completely turn his life around if sent to a private high school and invited to live in a rich family's pool house?
The other major area where 90210 and The O.C. clearly overlap is merchandising. Just a preteen when the show premiered, I can attest to the lure of 90210-mania: I had the t-shirts, the calendar, the Dylan McKay and Brenda Walls dolls. But not all of 90210's attempts at brand extension met with success; I remember being puzzled when a Beverly Hills 90210 soundtrack album was released, containing songs from Paula Abdul and Color Me Badd. Nearly every cultural reference within the first few seasons of 90210 pointed back in time. The one time the gang went to contemporary dance party, the experience was used, as Kile notes, to code contemporary L.A. as a dangerous wasteland, reinforcing the notion that the 90210 kids were better off listening to golden oldies at their one hangout, the 50s dine The Peach Pit. Releasing an album of early-90s dance pop under the 90210 brand was an obvious gimmick, one which felt false to this middle-schooler, who had developed a taste for the Beach Boys and Rebel Without a Cause solely through 90210's incessant plugging of such relics. My taste for 90210 dissipated soon after.
The issues surrounding The O.C.'s cultural influence became murkier when MTV launched Laguna Beach in 2004. At the time, though the FOX show wasn't an all-around ratings winner, it was considered appointment television for the very valuable 18-24 demographic. "At it's peak, The O.C. ruled the conversation at work and school the next day," Toomey confirms. "During the freshman season, it was all anyone was talking about." According to Gawker.com, MTV's original plan was to shoot an unscripted drama (read: reality show with heavy coaching and dramatic editing) at Beverly Hills High, but they decided to scrap that and move the operation to a private high school in Orange County, in order to capitalize on the popularity of The O.C. To that end, MTV added a subtitle to their show: "The Real Orange County."
You almost need a statistician to graph out the intertwined ironies that command the relationship between The O.C., Laguna Beach, and their separate but demographically equal audiences. For one thing, adults who watch The O.C. seem to be extremely protective of "their show" -- every O.C. fan I approached for this article insisted that the ascendancy of Laguna Beach couldn't have had anything to do with The O.C.'s second-season ratings drop, although a simple glance at the numbers would suggest otherwise. Within the world of mid-00s pop culture, the two shows resemble opposing cliques at the same high school. Laguna Beach represents the impossibly popular kids; standing in for typical high school lore's cheerleaders and athletes, they drive the best cars, have the best hair, and seem to live parent-less lives free of substance and consequences. On the other side, The O.C. stands in for the typical middle-class teenager who struggles with his/her identity, who tells the world how they feel through their taste in movies, books, comics, bands and clothes. These differences are compounded by each show's distinct mode of letting the audience in. The O.C., which is presented in traditional shot-reverse shot style, shows us its fictionalized Orange County community primarily through the eyes of Ryan, the brainy-but-scrappy outsider who can never quite catch up with the other kids in terms of class and coolness. Laguna Beach, a supposed reality show, presents its sort-of-real but clearly fictionalized Orange County community in extreme close-up, with cameras mounted inside SUVs and balanced on shoulders inside jacuzzis. Occasional intro narration aside, there's no single protagonist mediating the action -- which places the viewer in the role of the brainy-but-scrappy outsider who can never quite catch up with the other kids.
One show forces you to gawk at its coolness from afar, while the other invites you into the party. It's no wonder Laguna Beach gets the ratings, while The O.C. has to settle for the cultural influence. But here's where things start to get mind-bogglingly meta: Laguna Beach, in its rush to read hipness from what was being telegraphed from The O.C., sent a Journey song to millions of adolescent-owned iPods. Yes, that Journeyy.
Here's what happened: as part of an effort to demonstrate exactly how out-of-touch Ryan would be in Orange County as a refuge from Chino, the writers often had the character mention that Journey was his favorite band. When various plot theatrics would require the character to borrow Sandy's black SUV and take a drive back to his home town, Ryan would inevitably listen to Journey on the ride. This became an oft-repeated inside joke within the show, and within the pop culture surrounding it. Ryan also wore wife beaters as outerwear and used violence to solve pretty much all of his problems -- this was clearly not the character to be emulated. So, Journey never appeared on an O.C. soundtrack album, because the producers of the show weren't honestly suggesting that any cool contemporary teenager would actually drive down a highway listening to "Don't Stop Believing" cranked up to 11.
Somehow, MTV missed the irony. In July 2005, the second season of Laguna Beach premiered, and in it, a Laguna Beacher who has been away at college drives back to his hometown in his black SUV. The song playing on the soundtrack? Journey's "Don't Stop Believing." A week later, two songs from the episode's soundtrack had cracked the Top Ten Downloaded Singles chart on iTunes: "Just the Girl" by The Click Five, and Journey's "Don't Stop Believing." This phenomenon caused uber-cool indie rock tastemaker Scott Lapatine to declare on his blog, Stereogum, that "Laguna Beach is the new The O.C.". But though Steve Perry and friends no doubt appreciated the extra spare change earned from their new-found popularity, die-hard Journey fans went through the exact range of emotions described by Jonathan Toomey in reference to The O.C. Effect on indie rock. In a blog post dating back to January 2006, "Journey fan since the womb" Joe Colchester complained that his local bars were suddenly full of "crazy, young sorority sluts screaming, 'Just a small town girl, livin' in a...something...I love Journey!!!'' "They've become this band that everybody wants to like a lot but they don't care enough to learn anything else about them," Colchester griped. "Girls aren't debating whether the song "Lights" is really about San Francisco at their stupid-assed sorority 'cops and robbers' theme parties."
Labels: karina_work_stuff, the o.c.
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Questioning Sharon Waxman's reportage skills is not exactly a groundbreaking endeavor. I'm not only not the first to hop this train; I actually hopped it myself two years ago, in a short-lived column on Cinematical where I called out Waxman and friends for pumping the box-office-slump vein that was all the rage the summer of 2005 (succeeding regimes have, for reasons unknown to me, taken the heading in a different direction).
