"The O.C." Moment: In the beginning...

I can remember the night “The O.C.” premiered August 5, 2003.

I remember it because I actually had no intention of watching it—no matter how much FOX promoted it. But it came on, and I was so sucked in by those first five minutes, I had to keep watching.

The show began with a bang as Trey and his younger brother, Ryan, stole a car and then crashed it running from the police. Ryan’s lawyer, Sandy Cohen, showed up and the series moved from there. From the first moment I heard those opening strains of Phantom Planet’s “California” as Ryan tried to find a place to stay, I knew that “The O.C.” was something special…

TV pilots are a tricky thing. You have to make enough of a splash to get people to notice. But you also have to introduce enough of the characters and story to get people to come back. “The O.C. ” did both beautifully. The clothes were hot, the music was cool, the scenery was gorgeous, the writing was snappy and smart and the characters were well-defined as we found out everything we needed to know in that first episode.

All of the typical teen soap elements were there as well including a love triangle (Ryan-Marissa-Luke), unrequited love (Seth and Summer) and disapproving parents (Kirsten and Julie). But on this show they didn’t seem quite so clichéd.
I have to admit I get a little sad watching the pilot now, because no matter how good the show was, nothing it ever did compared to that first amazing hour.

If you have SOAPNet, you’ll be able to watch reruns of “The O.C.” beginning next month. I encourage you to check out that first episode to see what good television is all about. It’s just a shame that it couldn’t stay that way…

Various Artists -Music From The O.C. Mix 4

An admission: I've never seen one minute of "The O.C." Okay, maybe I tried to catch the one minute where the one skinny girl kissed the other skinny girl. But other than that, my experience with the show is made up entirely of promos glimpsed during commercial breaks of football games...okay, of "American Idol". Nothing I've seen from these 30-second flashes has put me off the common conclusion that the show is just Nu-"90210": teen drama taken to soap operatic exaggerations via an upper-bracket setting and emaciated people.

If that was all, "The O.C. " would be somewhere equivalent to "House" on my attentional scale, mere delay before hearing who's been voted home. But, of course, to the world Pitchfork inherits, "The O.C." has become much more, thanks to that scruffy haired character who doesn't look like Haley Joel Osment, and good old Death Cab for Cutie. Now mere mention of the show can induce a frantic feeling in slumped-shoulders zine-makers across the country, save for the segment that has (ironically? Double-reverse ironically? I'm too old to know any more) embraced the drama.

I don't think this allergic reaction has anything to do with the classic Sellout accusation, for surely we've all reached the post-modern point where we accept capitalism and don't begrudge our favorite bands for earning their fair ca$h money. No, I think "The O.C."'s boogeyman role has more to do with indie fans' perception of themselves than their worry for the eternal cred souls of the bands getting national exposure. That pang you're feeling when you hear the Walkmen on the show is the realization that indie lifestyle, in all of its anti-mainstream fervor, is just as commidifiable an identity as any high school hallway archetype, fit not only for the personality of an ensemble cast member but a whole slew of show-related merchandise...do they have "O.C." hoodies yet?

There's an uncomfortable fact about indie music underlying this realization as well, one that takes a lot of salty pride-swallowing to accept: Indie rock is just pop music, folks. Well, most of it is. It all makes so much sense in retrospect. I mean, obviously my 14-year-old fresh out of Vanilla Ice tapes self didn't fall in love with Crooked Rain Crooked Rain for Pavement's ability to innovate. It's 'cause they wrote pop songs, man, great pop songs, and even better for my age group, it was pop songs that nobody else was listening to! Well, okay, not as many people were listening to.

So every time "The O.C." releases one of their mix tapes (this is #4), it's like The Smoking Gun digging up an old crime report on the entire indie scene, blowing the cover on 1) its feelings of isolated superiority, and 2) its supposed disdain for pop music. Hell, even in my Zen-like well-adjusted state, I mentally flinched when I noticed that fully seven of the 12 tracks on this compilation were already somewhere in my digital archives, and that most are tracks that I myself would consider putting on a mix tape.

Unsurprisingly for a show that probably has a lot of montages of people walking alone on the beach and tearfully looking through shoeboxes full of old pictures and love letters and such, most of the tracks are from the glummer territories of indie rock. There's Pinback ("Fortress"), there's Sufjan ("To Be Alone With You"), and there's the Reindeer Section ("Cartwheels"), all whispery and acoustic-y. They're all fine songs, and the only thing unnerving about their inclusion is how well they segue from/into the radio-slick twee Dido-likes of Imogen Heap and Flunk. But if you hadn't already realized indie rock moved into an adult-contemporary phase a while back, you're in need of an alarm clock.

More spastic moments on the show (torrid beach volleyball matches? Jacuzzi fights?) are potentially scored by Futureheads ("Decent Days and Nights") or Modest Mouse (their dancepunk dalliance "The View"). A.C. Newman's "On the Table"-- like The Shins before him-- should serve as a nice gateway drug for teenagers to discover the record store, and one of Beck's new shambling country jams again make him look like the old guy at the frat party. Really, there's nothing terribly unpleasant here, save the sub-Maroon 5 act of someone called Bell X1 and a dreadful cover of "Champagne Supernova" from Matt Pond PA that adds nothing but string quartets and whininess to the godhead original.

So if this throwaway compilation has an underlying message, it's this: You're not special. That complex, detached, artfully depressed persona you've cultivated isn't unique; in fact, it's so easily simulated, the network that also brings you "Life on a Stick" can replicate it. But don't let it bring you down, it's only castles burning. Accelerate the inevitable: Embrace your lack of the unique, stop liking bands for their scarcity, enjoy the full spectrum of music, not just the portions with credibility directed prefixes. And don't forget to thank "The O.C." for saving you some time along the way.

'The O.C.' Rewrites the Rules of TV Writing

When you see Josh Schwartz on the set of "The O.C.," Fox's hit teen drama, it's easy to mistake him for one of the casually hip actors who pretend to be high school students on the show. But Mr. Schwartz is no actor, and his days on the set are rare. Most of the time, he's holed up in his modest Hollywood apartment, where he has spent the past year furiously writing or revising every one of the show's first 27 episodes.

It has been quite a year for Mr. Schwartz. Almost overnight, the 27-year-old has gone from obscure screenwriter to the youngest person in network history to create and produce his own one-hour series. The show, broadcast on Wednesdays at 9 p.m. (8 p.m. Central), is the season's highest-ranked new drama in the coveted 12-17 and 18-34 age brackets. Since it went on the air last August, Mr. Schwartz's script for the pilot has been nominated for a Writer's Guild Award, and he was signed to a multimillion-dollar deal by Warner Brothers to keep him producing "The O.C." and developing new shows. And in the strangest tribute yet, a law students' club at the University of California, Berkeley, has formalized its devotion to Sandy Cohen ? the feisty public defender played on the show by Peter Gallagher ? by establishing the Sandy Cohen Fellowship to support work in the Orange County public defender's office.

Mr. Schwartz has arrived at this point without so much as a day's previous experience on the staff of a TV show. "I have never seen anyone take to this medium as quickly as he has," said Marcy Ross, Fox's senior vice president of current programming. "I mean, sure, he's lost a lot of weight, he's falling apart, he does nothing but work. But he was born to do this."

Until recently, Mr. Schwartz's achievement would have been all but unthinkable. Network television was a strict dues-paying culture. Writers sweated it out for years on other people's shows ? earning arcane titles like "executive story editor" and "supervising producer" ? before getting a shot at creating their own. But lately those rules are being rewritten. "Networks are now clamoring for fresh voices that they otherwise would not have looked toward," said Rick Rosen, a partner at the Endeavor agency, which represents Mr. Schwartz. "And that includes feature writers and younger writers with less experience." The list of those who made the leap to show creator without first apprenticing on a staff includes J. J. Abrams ("Felicity," "Alias"), Anthony Zuiker ("C.S.I."), Hank Steinberg ("Without a Trace") and Ryan Murphy ("Popular," "nip/tuck"). These writers aren't so much creating new television forms as they are endowing familiar ones ? the detective show, or in the case of "The O.C.," teen drama ? with freshness and intelligence.

Last month, sitting in his tidy office at Manhattan Beach Studios, where the show is filmed, Mr. Schwartz recalled the "Trojan horse" strategy by which he got Fox's attention. He was developing the show with McG (the director of the "Charlie's Angels" films) and McG's producing partner, Stephanie Savage. "We knew Fox was looking for their next `90210,' " he said ? "Beverly Hills 90210," that is ? but " `90210' was not a show I watched or particularly liked or wanted to do." A lifelong Cameron Crowe fan, with a framed "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" poster on the wall beside his desk, he had always preferred quirkier character-driven shows, like "Freaks and Geeks," "Undeclared" and "My So-Called Life." "You can't tell a network that's what you want to make because they'll just say, `Those shows lasted 15 episodes and they're off the air and we don't want them.' But if instead you go to Fox and say, `This is your new "90210" ' ? that's something they can get excited about."

So Mr. Schwartz and Ms. Savage cleverly constructed a pilot ? the tale of Ryan Atwood, a gentle young hoodlum who finds himself living among the beautiful people of the titular Orange Country ? that pushed every glamour-teen button they could think of. "That's why it's got a bonfire on the beach, and `Karate Kid' without the karate, and a fashion show and a big bash with cocaine," he said. At the same time, however, "we felt we had this story that was organic to that world of beaches and sunshine and wealthy people. And really what we hoped we had were these characters that were a little bit funnier and more soulful and different and specific than the kinds you usually see in that genre. They would be the soldiers inside our Trojan horse."