Dear White People

Sometimes you come across something on Netflix that seems perfectly aimed at you.  This is how I felt when I was first served Dear White People via their unfathomable algorithm (probably based on the fact I had watched Friends From College and The Get Down).  Surely, this was a show for me, as I am definitely a white people.  But, you know what?  I’ve got a careful line to tread here using the snarky and irreverent tone that regular readers of this blog are used to.  I’m still going to be flippant when taking apart its style and pace, but its head-on tackling of racial sensitivity will not be coming in for that sort of treatment.  Firstly, because that would be whack, and secondly, because this part of the show is absolutely banging.  From a cynical perspective, we can view this purely as a plot device and state that the black/white friction throughout each episode generates gripping drama.  But as a human (from one of the least diverse villages in one of the least diverse counties of England) it prompts constant questions and internal discussions, ladling surprises on disappointments on confusion on outrage in an endless cycle of much-needed re-evaluation.  Sometimes, we all need to be challenged.

Welcome to the fictional Ivy League college of Winchester.  Here, the USA’s brightest (and wealthiest) young minds pursue further education among the leafy quads and historic traditions.  One of these traditions is that a particular hall of residence’s residing residents are African-Americans, leaving the campus segregated.  Each episode focuses on an individual student’s experience of this situation.  Not only are they navigating their own transition into adulthood by way of the pretend adult world of university life, but most of our characters are also coping with being minorities in a historically white-dominated environment.  Romantic relationships, friendships and academic stress, along with a lot of extra-curriculars, are par for the course, but, for our black and dual heritage characters, they must also cope with the prejudice, fetishisation, enthusiasm and guilt of their fellow students of all skin tones (but with heavy emphasis on liberal white students getting it totally wrong – white readers will cringe hard each time they recognise themselves).

Don’t worry, though, almost everyone is beautiful, and each episode is tantalisingly shot as if this is fodder for a boutique cinema showing European arthouse flicks.  But it’s not; it’s really good telly.  Even the colour palette of the lighting, the wardrobe and the interiors carries a stylised theme, with warm autumnal hues circling the storylines.  You will, however, stop and wonder how so much garishly patterned wallpaper needs to adorn the walls of Winchester’s dorms.  This crafting calls to mind shows like Girls, and the thirty-minute run time drives the likeness further.  In fact, it hoodwinked me into quite a run of allowing myself just one more episode (as each was only an extra half hour before I got off the sofa) and I got through the current two seasons in two days.

So how does each episode unfold?  Well, there’s a clever formula.  An omniscient narrator sardonically eases us into each instalment before revealing who’ll be our focus.  There’s Samantha, the host of Winchester student radio’s eponymous phone-in, Dear White People, in whom it’s easy to recognise the idealistic student activist.  Far more interesting is her best friend, Joelle, who combines a wicked sense of humour with being top of the class in everything.  On the boys’ side, there’s Troy, the dean’s son struggling under the weight of expectation, but still finding time to do all the sit ups so you’ll feel like a blob each time his clothes come off (which is all the time).  There’s also Reggie, whose unrequited love for Samantha is matched only by the unrequited-ness of Joelle’s love for him, but I was forced to question the latter because he makes some really dodgy choices with his sweaters, and then let’s not forget Lionel, the unassuming, aspiring journalist coming to terms with his sexuality.  At first, the cast seems like a standard run-through of generic college tropes, but their depth and originality is uncovered as we journey through the racist-infested water with them.  They all also have a fair bit of sex, as all students do, so be prepared to look like a perv if your viewing is ever interrupted.

At each episode’s conclusion, the focus character makes eye contact directly through the camera with you, the viewer.  It took me a while to notice this and then it became all I thought about.  Is it a knowing glance to acknowledge the overall artificiality of the whole production or is it in the spirit of being caught red-handed as a voyeur feasting on other people’s (racial) dramas from a (safe, judgment-free) distance?  Either way, the soundtrack cranks back up with an epic song selection that leaves you sitting there letting it all sink in.  Until Netflix’s autoplay kicks in and you’re back in to find out what happens next.

And I genuinely wanted to know.  The thing about young people, whatever their skin colour, is that they are idealists.  Their passions burn brighter than those of people who’ve been chained to office desks for the last eleven years (hiya!), so I defy anyone not to connect with all the dear different people of Dear White People.  Series one deals with the fallout of a black-face Halloween party, before building to an altercation with a white, gun-happy college security guard and climaxing with a sham town hall meeting to iron out racial tensions on campus.  The second series doesn’t feel as tightly packed: the characters cope with the rise of anonymous alt-right social media accounts and prepare for controversial public figures to descend on Winchester.  Throughout both, our intelligent and articulate heroes broadcast their responses in the student paper or on the student radio station.  If anything, this was the least credible part.  Based on my university experience, nobody listened to student radio, and we only looked in the newspaper to see whose pictures had appeared in the Fit College section.  But series two offers some explanations, showing that the radio is broadcast over speakers into the quads.  It also shows for the first time that these students actually go to class.

We don’t have dorm segregation in the UK, but Dear White People should be essential viewing everywhere.  I laughed out loud, I did myself mischief through excessive cringing and I cared deeply about the human drama.  I was entertained, but not in a way that was intended to distract me from realising that discussion about race, and specifically the experience of black people in America at the hands (and patronising comments) of white people, is not something to shy away from.  IMDB claims a third series is coming and I can’t wait.  Not because I’m taking pains to sound woke in my writing here, but because Dear White People is Netflix at its best.  More please.

University Challenge

Blimey, this is relentless.  Trying to keep up with my boxset viewing so I can post about a new show every week is taking its toll, so I’m having to trawl the archives again.  I’m spaffing the best part of an hour a night on Big Brother, plus Netflix has distracted me with new series of Bojack Horseman and Making A Murderer.  These aren’t just first world problems, they are overwhelmed-with-content first world problems.  This will be the greatest challenge of our modern age (after Brexit, Trump and global warming): there’s too much to watch.

Luckily, recent events have reminded me of a whole category of televisual programming that has been entirely absent from Just One More Episode: quiz shows.  Everybody loves a good quiz, especially me.  My college years saw me develop an unhealthy addiction to quiz machines, touring townie pubs under the mistaken view that the local clientele’s sub-par intelligence would be no match for our 18-year-old brains.  The machines’ algorithms were calibrated in our favour, we thought arrogantly, until we lost all our pound coins and finally realised that seasoned drinkers are some of the greatest treasure troves of trivia in British society.  My grad years in London saw many weeks punctuated with a good old pub quiz.  I think we once won the jackpot at The King William IV in Hampstead, where the quizmaster was a drag queen devoid of any sense of humour, though we never repeated this success at The Flask around the corner.  Each week, a band of elder gents calling themselves The Drinklings clinched the title, though they too looked thoroughly miserable about it.  So, does this mean that quizzes bring no joy?

Heck, no.  A friend’s birthday at the weekend included a quiz as part of the organised fun.  We all transformed into competitive monsters, none more so than I during the Beat The Intro round.  I’m genetically pre-disposed to a few things, such has having bits of ginger in my beard or feeling travel sick in automatic cars, but one of my favourite DNA traits is being able to identify any known song from its first beat (and by known, I mean known to me – I have no hope, obviously, if I’ve never heard it).  In that single second, the whole song plays to me instantly in my mind’s own radio station (where nobody judges the playlist).  Science has proven that this is genetic, as my dad and sister are the same, whereas my mum claims to have lost interest in music in 1983 (when my sister was born), so we know this is a dominant Honeywood gene, alongside tolerating comments about our surname and still laughing out loud at You’ve Been Framed.

Hang on, we’re three paragraphs in and I’ve not even reached the show in question yet.  To chime in with this recent quizzical development in my life, I’m taking on University Challenge.  Don’t worry though, as we’re not going to dwell on every tedious detail since the show first broadcast in 1962 or the fact it’s been on both ITV and the BBC (a bit like The Voice UK, but in the other direction).  Doing that wouldn’t allow enough time to talk about me (in addition to the first three paragraphs) so we’re just going to focus on my interactions with it and subsequent one-sided opinions.  I’m assuming this is entertaining for you, but there are gifs throughout which you can look at if it’s not.

I’ll confess to the fact I never really knew what the show was until I got to university.  People seemed to think it was acceptable during Freshers’ Week to talk about an intellectual gameshow, a format that was already 41 years old in 2003.  It’s worth clarifying that our Freshers’s Week lasted a matter of days before the first essays were set and the fun was killed off – welcome to Oxford, bitch (a throwback to a previous post on The OC; swap Californian sunshine for bone-chilling frost, surfing for swotting and enjoying your teenage years for a higher volume of work than a person can ever realistically deliver, and they’re basically the same thing.)  New fellow students asked if I had seen how our college had done (getting beaten by London Metropolitan University in the first round, but making it through to the quarter finals on a highest losing score loophole).  I hadn’t; I was probably watching Little Britain or Celebrity Big Brother instead.

Fast forward a few years, and I was an impoverished graduate sharing a flat with four others above a Costa in Belsize Park.  Income was low, but London was (and is) expensive, so communal TV viewing became a mainstay of our pastimes (alongside the pub quizzes mentioned before).  On Monday evenings, in particular, none of us were out and about.  Thus, University Challenge soon became our favourite programme.  And this was because we didn’t just watch the show, we watched it competitively.  The trick was to shout out answers before the contestants did, or, better still, before Jeremy Paxman even finished the question.  To this day, even if I find myself watching Uni Chall (my affectionate abbreviation… that’s never caught on), I still call out answers to nobody.  Maybe the neighbours upstairs, when not trotting about in heels on wooden floors, are impressed.

“Woah!” I hear you readers cry, “What do you mean you knew the answers!?”  Indeed, let’s dwell on the fact that this is TV’s most academically challenging quiz.  This isn’t The Weakest Link, where questions come directly from the GCSE syllabus for double science, nor is it National Lottery In It To Win It, where Sally from Ashby de la Zouch is counselled through deciding whether Rome, Paris or Madrid is the capital of France by a wonderfully patient Dale Winton (RIP) before plumping for Rome because Pat off of next door once went there and said it was well good.  No, these are the hardest questions ever, veering from chemical formulae to mathematical equations via obscure literature, forgotten painters and niche geography.  Yes, there can be music rounds, but this isn’t Beat The Intro on the biggest radio airplay hits from 2000 to 2010 (my specialism), this is opera and classical and all that jazz, including, funnily enough, jazz.  Therefore, if you’re getting between one and three answers in a thirty-minute episode, you’re reaching the upper echelons of British intellect (although this is against a low base of people who’ve voted Conservative and for Brexit).

Each university that is being challenged puts forward four of its brightest minds.  Oxford and Cambridge, however, divide themselves into their constituent colleges, so the 70 or so students of St Benet’s Hall, Oxford can take on a team representing the 28,000 undergraduates and 13,000 postgraduates of the University of Manchester.  A starter question, worth ten points, is read out, and anyone can buzz.  Get it wrong, and you’re punished with a deduction.  Get it right, and you freeze out the other team, unlocking three questions, worth five points each, on a single subject, though the answers must come through the team captain.

Play then ensues and often features the following highlights:

Jeremy Paxman telling off the contestants

Paxman by name, man who packs a lot in, by nature.  Does that work?  Never mind.  In short, Paxman ain’t got time for your shit.  If the conferring goes on too long, viewers are treated to a gloriously withering, “Come on, Emmanuel, let’s have it,” wrong-footing the captain into giving a clanger of an incorrect answer.

Jeremy Paxman laughing at you for being wrong

Further derision from Paxman greets each clanger.  Nothing consolatory is ever said, as stupidity is a sin at Uni Chall.  “No!” he’ll chuckle before shuffling his question cards.  Easy for him to hurl out abuse, what with the answers written down for him.

Contestants’ faces during a music round

While some unknown concerto fills the studio, it’s hard to know what expression best befits the situation.  Poised to identify the sixteenth century composer, our academic challengers inadvertently strike something between a baby’s poo face and the nose wrinkle you make when walking straight into a dangerous fart.

The Shakespeare strategy

I’ve made this up, but the three five-point questions are always on a theme.  If you even understand the question, which can be demanding in itself, you might as well guess the answer, as you’ve got three changes for it to be right.  Therefore, if Jeremy asks “Which Shakespeare play…?” just keep shouting Macbeth and, chances are, you’ll pick up five points eventually.

A slightly embarrassed mature student

There’s no age limit, so don’t be surprised to see a silver-haired sexagenarian studying for a doctorate in anthropology and aromatherapy cringing in their cardigan each time a greasy teenager exposes their lack of knowledge about the Byzantine Empire.

Some personalities

Over the years, controversy has swirled around the show.  Debates have arisen over whether female contestants’ appearances are subjected to unfair criticism, something the men are spared (though should also experience based on some of their jumper choices).  Student life is a time to try out being an adult with no obligation to buy the real thing, so if a young mind is more focused on the deep study of Renaissance architecture than on how often human hair should be washed, then more power to them.  We scoff at their jumpers and hairstyles to cover our own insecurities.  We don’t know any of the answers, but these bright young things will go on to earn more than us, or their further studies will add knowledge to human life and provide a benefit to us all that we simply can’t see yet.  So yes, chuckle now at the double-barrelled pipsqueak going cross-eyed doing on-the-spot geometry.  His thesis will render your whole industry obsolete, probably.

University Challenge is a safe space for the intellectuals, holding out on primetime TV while we race to the bottom of human achievement with the likes of Love Island and Ex On The Beach.  It’s as British as being splashed by a bus driving through a puddle, only we’re showered in useless knowledge instead of murky rainwater.  May Uni Chall last another 56 years, brightening our Monday evenings with the sight of young geniuses getting berated for not knowing their Boticelli from their botany, their Galileo Galilei from their Gail Trimble and their network topology from their Netflix.

Lost

Let’s go back to some glossy American dross this week.  I’m going to take on Lost, not because I feel I have anything truly valuable to add to the enormous canon of online chatter regarding this show, especially eight years after it ended, but because, in the art of determining what makes a great boxset, we need to acknowledge that Lost was nailing Boxset 101 long before boxset bingeing was really a thing (I’m not sorry I’ve said boxset so many times).  And, hilariously, its strengths in some areas are rendered utterly null by its awful, awful shortcomings in others.

In the UK, Lost premiered on Channel 4 in 2004.  To this day, the beautiful promotional trailers exist in my memory in perfect form.  On a beach setting, shot as if some sort of fragrance advert, a collection of striking people, diverse in skin tone, age, shape and size, stare moodily into the distance while a sea breeze gently caresses their tattered clothing, each character carefully placed among the smoking wreck of a crashed aeroplane, like a disastrous Kardashian Christmas card.  Music plays.  Supers appear on screen: one of these people is a murderer, one of these people is cheating etc.  I think I might have lied about remembering everything, as I honestly can’t recall all the stated facts.  Nevertheless, I was immediately drawn in.  The tension had me.  With all these secrets, the fall out at their inevitable exposition was bound to be epic.

But, a few episodes in, the show just wasn’t doing it for me, and I gave up.  How fickle.  Months later, I was deep in my year abroad in Germany.  Working in a school, I was often done for the day by 11am and had literally nothing else to fill my time with, even after hanging around in a gym for two hours despite the staff mistakenly calling me Roger, or making endless rounds of gluten-free pancakes because they were the only thing I knew how to cook.  One housemate had a large selection of DVDs and I made my way through all of them.  Even unmarked ones.  I didn’t realise how risky this could be, but instead of homemade porn, I found myself in possession of episodes 14 and 15 of Lost’s first season.  With nothing else to do, I eagerly watched both.  And I enjoyed them.

That’s when I got lost in Lost.  I’m gonna say it: series one was a masterpiece.  I loved everything about it.  And that’s because it had everything: the survivors of a plane crash building a new society on a desert island (such societal commentary – how would their old lives play out in this new situation?), unknown threats lurking in the jungle just beyond the beach (wait, is that a polar bear?), each character’s pre-crash backstory getting played out in flashbacks in their own dedicated episode (thrown to with the same sound effect that made everything seem more tense, slowly teasing out details relevant to the current on-island storyline), so much that couldn’t be explained (how come Locke can walk now?) and then each episode climaxing in a cliff-hanger that leaves you unable to live your life until you can find out more.

It also helped that this all played out in tropical sunshine.  It was like being on holiday via the television.  But while the first series was neat and tight, and the second nearly delivered on the promise to build on this epic set up, the later series up to the sixth seemed to suffer from a chronic form of and-thenism, where the writers desperately clutched at straws to try to explain what had come before, resorting to further and further fetched departures from reality until the show could no longer be classified in any genre other than gubbins.  I loved the creepiness of the Dharma Initiative, I wanted to get in the hatch so bad, I was obsessed with the numbers that had to be entered, I couldn’t work out why Hurley never slimmed down on a restricted castaway diet, I couldn’t cope with the excitement and intrigue offered by the Others.  Every time someone tried to get away from the island, nature seemed to thwart them.  I had to know everything about this place.

But with so many questions unanswered, Lost was never able to deliver a resolution.  There was a smoke monster, an invisible man rocking on a chair in a hut, an island that could be moved, key cast members leaving the island and then coming back, flashbacks that became throw-forwards and the constant presence of Ben Linus’s really really annoying face.  And then how did everyone know how to track?  They could follow someone across the whole island based on a few broken twigs and a leaf in the wrong place.  I’m looking at you, Kate and Jack.  What about the other people in the background?  I always wondered what they were up to, though I suppose Rose and Bernard (pronounced Bern-AAARRRD) broke the mould to come forward and say a few incidental lines.  Haemorrhaging fans, Lost limped to a listless conclusion, and, in the process, I lost hours of my life.

However, I gave those hours willingly, and that’s because Lost was a boxset masterclass in stringing the viewer along.  It built a whole world with its own mythology and expanded that out exponentially with a freedom no other show (that I have seen myself) had managed to do.  There was nothing else like it and I think we all loved the braveness.  We weren’t just working out why a prostitute was murdered, we were trying to piece together much more complicated things (while looking at beautiful people on a sunny beach).  All that suspense and tension needed the best pay off ever developed by a team of TV writers.  Lost bottled this so hard that it felt like assault.  This accusation is unfair, as the show was doomed from the start – it could never live up to its own expectations.

So, what have we learned?  Don’t tease out your audience for six series, only to have built up so much mystery that you forget what was going on in the first place.  But let’s commend the ambition.  Lost changed the telly landscape.  If we had lost Lost, it would have been our loss.

The Rain (Regnen)

63 posts in and I’ve done my best to balance out American shows with British ones, and even thrown in some Australian (shout out to Summer Heights High), but I’ve been hugely neglectful from a linguistic perspective.  Besides some subtitled Spanish in Fear The Walking Dead, and some other bits and bobs, everything has been an English-language production.  How can I hope to guide people through the world of boxset quality (and boxset trash) if I just stick to my mother tongue?  Given this blog is also dominated by me talking about myself, we should acknowledge that a defining feature of mine, alongside lacking human emotion and laughing too loudly, is my multilingualism.  We’ll go into that in more detail another time, as I know readers are keen to hear about my voyages into French and German.  Instead, the first foreign language show to make it into Just One More Episode is actually Danish.  Readers, I give you The Rain (Regnen, in Danish, but it seems the Danes also just call it The Rain).

And no, this isn’t the 1997 hit my Missy Elliott with brackets after it containing the words Supa, Dupa and Fly.  It’s a real Netflix original production.  English speakers have traditionally shunned foreign-language productions from mainstream consumption.  Subtitles require reading, and reading feels, for some people, too much like trying to watch a book.  The effort required is not given easily, as we Brits are indulged by the rest of the world speaking our language, and are therefore too lazy to make any effort in the other direction.  However, Netflix seems to have versions of all its foreign-language programming dubbed into English.  While this removes a barrier, it adds the new one of lips not matching to sounds.  I’ll happily read thousands of words of subtitles to avoid the distraction of bad dubbing – it can drag down any drama, making it feel like some sort of pan-European lemon Cif advert.  Watching with subtitles has another benefit if you can’t understand the language at hand.  The constant reading requires more attention than just listening, helping to keep those tippy-tappy fingers off your smartphone and your terrible second-screening habits.  So, with full focus, let me transport you to a dystopian Denmark.

As I said in the last paragraph, before heading off on a wild tangent, it’s about the rain.  There’s nothing worse in life than getting soaked in the rain, even though it’s our natural state as Brits.  However, the rain in, er, The Rain, carries a virus.  So, not only do your jeans get damp, not only does wet sock (a fully recognised condition first discovered when you’ve just put on fresh socks and then accidentally tread in your housemates’ shower puddles, requiring a second pair of fresh socks) upset your toes, but you also die a horrific death.  In episode one, at first, the rain is on its way.  We watch through the eyes of our heroine, Simone, as her father cryptically gathers the family from their normal lives to whisk them to safety.  The times he spends saying “there’s no time to explain” is technically a perfectly sufficient period in which to give everyone the full lowdown on what’s occurring.  But that wouldn’t be any fun.  The clouds gather, people get the washing in off the line, and Simone’s family are hunkered down in a conveniently located bunker.

I’m obliged not to give too much away, but most of the action then proceeds six years later.  Simone has raised her little brother, Rasmus, in Fritzl-esque isolation, but how will the siblings cope back in the real world?  As I said with Black Mirror, I love a dystopian future.  In this one, you stay out the rain, you’re chased by people with drones and you end up in a ragtag band of young survivors, the bright colours of whose cagoules are only matched by the strength of their hormonal yearnings for each other.  There’s Jean (which sounds delightfully like Sheen in Danish) who’s all curly hair and glasses, another one with a bad attitude and backwards baseball cap signifying his bad attitude, and also a blonde girl with traintracks, which you don’t see much of these days.  And many more.  Like any young group of Europeans, they squabble, swear and have an open-minded approach to nudity.  They may also be an allegory for how a new generation must clean up after their parents’ mistakes, but I’ll try not to make everything about Brexit…

The whole series carries the tension of a summer BBQ: everyone hopes it’s not going to rain.  Simone seems to be able to navigate around all of Denmark’s rural areas from memory, conveniently coming across further bunkers in order to replenish the group’s stock of cereal bars.  In between, back stories illuminate elements of our characters’ personalities, though the effects of six years in a bunker seem completely overlooked for Simone and Rasmus, but they’re probably busy focusing on the array of threats a post-apocalyptic Denmark offers.

You’ll feel intellectual for consuming a boxset in a different language, though Danish does sound curiously like English with all the effort removed, a sort of aspirated sigh from the back of the throat.  Have fun spotting words that are similar (to go seems to be “go”) while the fun of trying to match the sounds to the subtitles gradually wears off.  As the series went on, I found it harder and harder to remind myself that I didn’t speak Danish, forgetting to read the subtitles as if there had been a sudden comprehension miracle.  Sure, I missed some plot points, but we all know I do this in English anyway.  Turns out I don’t listen, no matter what the language.

Right, so that’s a fourth country of origin added into the fold here, and there’ll be more to come.  Let’s not see the multitude of European tongues as a barrier to union.  Let’s look for what we have in common.  Some people don’t like reading subtitles.  Most people don’t like getting soaked in the rain.  And everyone hates a wet sock.

The OC

Californiaaa.

Califooorniaaa.

Here we coooooome.

I think we’re all guilty of screeching these lyrics at some point during a night out.  Invariably, it’s gone midnight.  People’s standards have dropped, responding to overplayed cheese music with raucous cheers and conflating jumping up and down out of time with dancing.  On comes one of the pitchiest theme songs we’ve ever known and suddenly we’re all guilty of the delusion we can reach and sustain those big notes as sung out by Phantom Planet.  I’ve come close to asphyxiation several times, but it’s worth it for that brief sentiment that I’m some sort of Californian teenager, rather than an adult who should know better, trying to relive their university heyday, spending my Student Loan in Oxford’s The Bridge nightclub.

That’s right: this week, we’re doing The OC.  Why?  Why not!?  Also, I haven’t finished anything new in a while and you readers seem to lap up the nostalgia.  Reminding people about when they were young is some of the biggest clickbait the internet was invented for.  You’re not eighteen anymore, but let’s see if I can’t remind you just how many possibilities lay ahead of you then by taking up a thousand words or so of your time now.  But, the first thing I want to point out is our ridiculous obsession with California in the first place.  I didn’t grow up there.  My Orange County was Mole Valley; my California was Surrey.  A teen show called The MV (which we never even called our district at the time) with a theme tune that involves belting out the word Surrey repeatedly would just never had had the same global appeal.

But what was it about The OC that drove us so wild in 2003?  It wasn’t even on at a convenient time.  It appeared in the T4 schedule, thrown to by a smug Steve Jones and an even smugger Miquita Oliver (love them both), at something like 11.15am on a Sunday.  These were the days before setting the Sky Plus, so you had to make sure you knew where to be on a Sunday morning.  TVs were hard to come by in my student days (having already alluded to the TV room situation in my Desperate Housewives post) but one of us did have a teeny tiny 14 incher in their room.  Up to 20 of us would clamber onto any available service for an overpopulated group viewing, unable to make out what was happening onscreen and deafened to any of the dialogue by constant chatter and subsequent shushing as we reacted wildly to anything we did happen to follow.  Ah, such good times, then.

At the show’s heart were the Cohen family, whose wealth was matched only by their do-goodishness.  Patriarch, Sandy, summoned power from his enormous eyebrows, saying the words “pro bono” over and over until they were nothing but a euphemism.  His wife, Kirsten (which sounds abhorrent in an American accent and was therefore abbreviated to Kiki, which was just creepy instead) had different coloured highlights in her straightened hair and a wealthy dad off Neighbours.  Their awkward son, Seth, displayed his awkwardness by having his every line overwritten into banter, disguising the fact he was deeply annoying for many series.  I’m making everyone sound unlikeable, but this was over a decade ago and times were simpler.  We tolerated worse people in our Californian drama.

In the first episode, the Cohens adopt a lad from the wrong side of the tracks: enter Ryan Atwood, played by a forty-year-old (probably) but supposedly a school-age kid.  The OC didn’t care that your knowledge of LA neighbourhoods was limited: just by saying he was from Chino we had to understand that he was from bad stock.  Maybe Chino is like Croydon.  I don’t know.  Our bad boy tries to mix into wealthy society with mixed results, boosting Seth’s street cred, but also getting him into trouble.  Luckily, someone was on hand to say, “Welcome to the OC, bitch.”

Indeed, it was the bitches of The OC that became breakout stars.  We were all abuzz about the beauty and coolness of Marisa Cooper, but it was her sidekick Summer who had the best lines and an actual personality (even getting referenced in a Rizzle Kicks song years later).  Like Gossip Girl (with which the show shared some development), things ramped up around an event in each episode, typically spoiled in some way, often by Ryan’s wrong-side-of-the-tracksness.  The four seasons must have got repetitive, as I don’t remember finishing them all, but for an hour every Sunday morning, we could truly believe we were Californians.

When I finally went to California for the first time in 2014, I forced friends take me to the OC, even though my visit was already self-invited.  We sat on Laguna Beach and then had a fancy lunch.  I had a wee in the sea to mark the occasion.  Among my student pals, we all found different ways to express our obsession with the show.  One individual, editing the features section of one of our student newspapers, the Cherwell, would use Ryan Atwood as a pseudonym for the articles he wrote for his own pages.  I painstakingly downloaded the soundtracks from Kazaa, following the exact track-listing of each Mix in the series of Music From The OC, falling in love with songs like Dice by Finley Quaye & William Orbit, and Fortress by Pinback.  Maybe if I listened to the music hard enough, I would be a resident of Orange County too.

In conclusion: Californiaaa, there we went.  A show whose cast and storylines once seemed like the most important things in the world is now nothing more than a standard selection from a wedding DJ.  Relive your youth and watch it again.  Root for Seth getting a date with Summer.  Root for Ryan to overcome the prejudices suffered by a boy from Chino.  Root for yourself to find out what Chino is.  Root for Marisa’s mum’s lips to be slathered in so much lip gloss you can see your own reflection in them.  I haven’t done any of these things; I’ve just gathered some hazy recollections and then done a second-rate job of fact-checking them on Wikipedia.

So, let’s repeat to fade, now that we have run out of things to say:

Californiaaa.

Califoooorniaaa…