The O.C. is sensationalism gone awry

Let’s stop lying to ourselves: The O.C. sucks.

While the majority of people at Dartmouth will acknowledge that The O.C. isn’t a terrific show, they will, in an effort to seem chill and to justify their love for the show, maintain that it is at least a decent one. The show is modest, the reasoning goes, in that its goal is to maximize both sensationalism and glamour in every episode. Though this goal is not lofty, the show succeeds in fulfilling it perfectly. Watching any five minute clip of the show, however, will blow this thinking to bits; The O.C. isn’t just humbly bad show, it’s an awful one.

Since when is being as sensational as possible a strength? Jerry Springer is sensational; soap operas are sensational. Critics accuse daytime TV of a lot, but no one ever accused it of being good. Reunion, the show following The O.C., takes sensationalism to its limit. In the first twenty minutes of this week’s episode, the audience learned that a priest had fathered a child as a result of a high school tryst. After giving her up for adoption, the mother of the priest’s daughter hires an expensive lawyer to get her child back. To finance her legal fees, the teen mother borrows $20,000 from another high school friend, who does not in fact have this money, etc. The sensationalism of The O.C., like the sensationalism of Reunion, is more laughable than laudable. If recounted aloud, the plots of both shows, like the background stories of Jerry Springer, sound more like set-ups to elaborate jokes (à la The Aristocrats) than the central events of actual dramas.

Jerry Springer at least reinforces its absurdity with plausible sequences of events. The O.C., however, cannot for all its exaggerated characters provide a single storyline that holds water for the duration of an hour episode. Julie Cooper wants her daughter Marissa to lie about having shot Trey because she’s worried about Marissa not getting into college? Though contrived, this unrealistic character motive can probably be excused on the grounds that none of the writers of The O.C. have ever filled out a college application and so couldn’t know any better. But the con-artist Charlotte Morgan paying $30,000 to enter a rehab clinic to swindle a rich recovering alcoholic? I’m willing to cede some ground to the fact that all characters on The O.C. are caricatures, but The O.C.’s plots should at least have to withstand a minimum level of common sense.

Of course, the reason most people at Dartmouth will admit to watching The O.C. and not Jerry Springer is that The O.C. is about rich, good-looking high schoolers and Jerry Springer is about poor, hygiene-deficient white trash. While glamour, unlike sensationalism, can be an important element in a good TV show, with the exception of Mischa Barton (Marissa) the actors and actresses of The O.C. are in no way up to the glamour that the show would have them convey. They are good-looking and charismatic, but not good-looking or charismatic enough to live up to the way their characters appear in the show’s scripts. Rachel Bilson (Summer) is not stunningly gorgeous but instead has a cute Care Bear look; Benjamin McKenzie (Ryan) is supposed to be a brooding, misunderstood James Dean but instead comes across as flat-out dumb; and Adam Brody (Seth) looks every week like he’s accidentally wandered onto the set and is wondering why he’s in the midst of so many very good-looking people.

A lesser though funnier flaw is the absurd way The O.C. will often inexpertly contrast the upscale locales of Newport Beach with the grungy, crime-infested place that is the rest of the world. This past week, for instance, part of The O.C. took place in a public school that looked like it would fit more into Soviet Moscow than Orange County. All the students wore generic clothes and were apparently too destitute to have their clothing laundered. One particular scene, which was shot through a chain-linked fence, showed a bunch of ugly students grouped for maximum effect around a radiant Mischa Barton. As The O.C. constantly reminds us, while the nicer parts of Newport Beach are inhabited only by lawyers and heiresses, greater California contains only deviants like rapists and swindlers scheming to destroy Newport’s sunny paradise.

The O.C.’s supposed strengths help it very little. Its most touted strength, sensationalism, is actually its greatest drawback and, while its gorgeous shooting locales and rich sets do lend the show glamour, the show’s actors are in the end incapable of conveying the level of glamour to which The O.C. aspires. This begs the question of why anyone who thinks The O.C. is a terrible show would know enough about it to write an article about it.

The answer is simple: I love The O.C. As anyone who has ever eaten Kraft Mac & Cheese can attest to, just because something’s bad doesn’t mean it’s not extremely enjoyable. In fact, going to Dartmouth probably makes watching The O.C. more enjoyable. It delivers the strange, masochistic pleasure only derived from a show watched despite one’s better judgment. So relax, enraptured viewers. Enjoy the cool, sultry breeze of well being that seems to emanate from your TV whenever The O.C. is on; continue planning your Thursdays around the 8-9 PM timeslot; and please, pretend to be loudly talking about Foucault while discreetly engaging in conversation about Ryan, Summer, or Marissa. We will all need a little something extra to get us through the coming month of O.C. reruns.