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…