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Welcome to the O.C.: An Oral History provides a behind-the-scenes look at the iconic series and its cast and crew. The 350 pages dive into the world that show creator Josh Schwartz and executive producer Stephanie Savage lived in vicariously in the early aughts.
Specifically from 2002 to 2007, which was when The O.C. ran. Co-written by The Rolling Stones' chief TV critic Alan Sepinwall, Schwartz and Savage detail how the teen drama became a revolutionary TV show, according to The Hollywood Reporter's Abbey White.
The O.C.: A quick history
The O.C. followed Ryan Atwood (Ben McKenzie), a troubled but gifted young man from the wrong side of Orange County. He gets adopted by a wealthy couple, Sandy (Peter Gallagher) and Kristen Cohen (Kelly Rowan). Ryan moves in with the Cohen and forms a bond with the couple's son, Seth (Adam Brody). When he enrolls in Seth's pricey school, Harbor School, he meets Marissa Cooper (Mischa Barton), Summer Roberts (Rachel Bilson) and Taylor Townsend (Autumn Reeser).
The O.C.'s first season scored 77% on the Tomatometer on Rotten Tomatoes, with an audience score of 86%. A Variety critic described the show as stepping away from “jaw-dropping plot-twists and cleavage to wood auds.”
Its second season scored even higher with the critics at 86%, the highest of all four seasons. The critics' consensus said, “The O.C.'s second season doles out the series' hallmarks in spades with a wealth of sly humor and addictive melodrama — all set to an infectious indie rock soundtrack.”
But before we delve into what went wrong, let's take a look at the highlights of Welcome to the O.C.
Sebastian Stan auditioned for Johnny — the controversial character in season three. However, while the show's team did see his audition tape, he wasn't cast at all.
Schwartz told the author, “I said to [casting head] Patrick Rush, ‘This is the worst thing to come out of this book. I hate us.' He goes, ‘You can just tell him not to put it in the book.' And I said, ‘No, the shame must be publicly shared. We cannot hold this inside.'”
Stan's fine. He ended up working with Schwartz and Savage next big hit, Gossip Girl. And he became The Winter Soldier/White Wolf in the MCU. Oh, and he's set to play young Donald Trump. As you do.
As in most successful shows, spinoffs invariably get spun off. In The O.C.'s case, there was supposed to be not so much a spinoff as a “spiritual companion” right after its first season, Athens. The series was announced at Fox upfronts in 2004 without even a single script page from Schwartz. He said it was supposed to be “set at a college in New England, and it was the story of this fuck-up young professor, and his relationship with this troubled kid, and about the kids that kid falls in with.”
However, the enthusiasm for the project waned off. The O.C.'s executive producer, Bob DeLaurentis pointed out that, “to my knowledge, no one has ever developed a spinoff after a season one.” It was too stressful for Schwartz, who had just finished 27 episodes of The O.C. And so Athens, or as it was at one point changed to Anthem, never got off the ground.
Just to clarify, those 27 episodes were for one season. In today's streaming world, that would be equivalent to two seasons and three quarters.
This is the time to address the steep ratings drop of the show's later seasons, specifically season three, which had the lowest ratings. Rotten Tomato has it at a 50% critic score, and worse a 59% audience score.
This certain got to star Adam Brody who addressed his “lack of professionalism” regarding the later seasons. Brody said he stopped reading the scripts after some time, and Savage noted that they were just stacked up outside his trailer.
Director Norman Buckley recounted in the book about having a conversation with the actor about trying to be more invested in the show. For his part, Schwartz said one of his regrets was that he was absent when this was happening.
Brody insists that he was still polite to everyone and “would never scream or yell at anyone, or say anything f***ing mean.” However, he said that he let his “distaste for the later episodes be known.”
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He continued, “I didn't mask that at all, and I'm sure I openly mocked it a bit. So I'm not proud of that.”
McKenzie reflected on that time by saying that Brody wasn't the only one who was disappointed.
“It was too bad, because I think that energy is an amorphous thing. It grows and seeps in, and it does feed on itself. And so everyone gets in the feisty, feisty mood,” he recalled.
However, he said Bilson was the only one who seemed to have never fallen victim of that set's dreary mood.
So why was everyone so glum? The third season was when the show kinda sorta went off the rails. Barton wanted out of the show so she had to be written off. And the show achieved this by killing Marissa.
While the show was always billed as teen soap opera playing on prime time, this time critics and audiences thought they took it too far. The O.C. never really recovered after that.
But it's not all doom and gloom in the book. Chris Carmack who played Luke Ward, Marissa's ex-boyfriend who had uttered one of the most iconic lines in the show, “Welcome to the O.C., b***h!,” recalled how his house got suddenly upgraded for a magazine photo shoot.
“I thought, ‘This is hilarious. Sure! Come show what squalor new actors are living in. This will be great,'” he recounted the incident.
“And they showed up, were horrified, and immediately went to Target and started staging the house,” Carmack added.
The book goes more into detail about other incidents and memories of the cast and crew of the show. One favorite has to be that of director Doug Liman jumping off the boat while shooting an episode for The O.C. because he was late to a meeting for a movie he was also filming, 2005's Mr. & Mrs. Smith.
In case you forgot, Adam Brody was in that movie too.
