Where were you when Marissa Cooper died in Ryan Atwood’s arms? For diehard fans of The OC, it’s a memory more visceral than Princess Diana’s funeral. Ryan’s car being bumped off the road by bad boy Volchok, Ryan dragging Marissa out of the burning wreckage, Marissa saying “Don’t leave”, as she realises she’s dying, Imogen Heap’s breathy version of Hallelujah kicking in … Hang on, just need a moment.
It hit so hard because, three seasons earlier, the start of the on/off relationship between Ryan (Ben McKenzie) and Marissa (Mischa Barton) had ignited the best teen drama of all time. When they first meet in the pilot episode, wrong-side-of-the-tracks Ryan cockily tells poor-little-rich-girl Marissa that he’ll be “whoever you want me to be” when she bums a cigarette off him. Later, after a wild beach party, Ryan proves he’s a good egg, really, when he picks up an unconcious Marissa and carries her home to safety. The tale of these star-crossed lovers, which included Marissa shooting Ryan’s brother and an overdose in Tijuana, would go on to capture millennial hearts everywhere.
It has been 20 years since that opening episode, which also featured the unforgettable line: “Welcome to The OC, bitch!” McKenzie has gone on to, er, write a book about cryptocurrency, while Barton is about to, er, star in the all-new Neighbours. But a whole generation still carries an enduring nostalgia for the show about the high dramas of Orange County – and it’s about way more than just Ryan and Marissa.
Cocaine! Threesomes! Fights! Fashion shows! Mansions! The OC was mind-blowing for any bored small-town teenager watching on a rainy Sunday afternoon when it first launched in 2003. Most of us identified with Ryan – the outsider from Chino who, after being invited to live in the Cohens’ pool house, could not believe that high-schoolers lived like this. Creator Josh Schwartz, who was only in his mid-20s when he made the show with co-producer Stephanie Savage, said it was based on his own experience. “Coming as a Jewish kid from the East Coast to [the University of Southern California], Orange County/Newport Beach was an entirely new world to me,” he said. “I wanted it to be as appealing and as seductive for audiences as it was to me and I wanted the characters in that world to be as accessible to the audiences as someone like Ryan was.”
But it was actually Seth Cohen (Adam Brody) – Ryan’s unlikely best friend and sort-of foster brother – who Schwartz channelled his own persona into most. From his verbose ramblings to Death Cab for Cutie playlists, skateboarding in tracksuit jackets and a comic book addiction – Seth was the indie nerd girls wanted to go sailing with and guys wanted to be. “Josh is very into indie music and so we went to a lot of concerts together those first couple years … [Seth] is really like half him, half me,” Brody said recently. “I don’t think [he] is the original hipster, but he’s the first ‘teen soap hipster’,” he said in another interview.
While the creation of the Chrismukkah holiday (the merging of Christmas and Hanukkah, duh) was probably Seth’s most Seth moment, his character was nothing without his longtime crush Summer Roberts (Brody’s then real-life girlfriend, Rachel Bilson, who was originally only meant to star in a few episodes). Summer didn’t even know Seth’s name until he recited a poem that he remembered her writing as a child: “I wish I was a mermaid and was friends with all the fish, a shiny tail and sea shells … that’s what I would wish.” Summer kissed Seth for the first time, and another iconic on/off relationship ensued. Over four seasons, Summer would dress up as Wonder Woman, Seth would declare: “It’s always been you, Summer” and they would share a Spiderman-style upside-down kiss. Oh, and let’s not forget their toy horses, Captain Oats and Princess Sparkle.
But this show wasn’t just about the kids; the adults had even juicier lives – which was something new for teen dramas. Seth’s dad, public defender Sandy Cohen (Peter Gallagher), was the anti-Newport moral compass of the show with his magnificent eyebrows. He was also a hilariously embarrassing dad (“We Cohens are very sexual beings. Virile. Get used to it,” he tells poor Seth during a sex talk). It comes as no surprise that in a recent podcast Gallagher said he held an annual event called “Camp Gallagher” at his house, where the cast played long games of capture the flag.
Marissa’s mom Julie Cooper (Melinda Clarke), was similarly complex. She started the show as a Juicy Couture-clad, acid-tongued, gold-digging villain, who slept with her daughter’s boyfriend and tried to frame Ryan for attempted murder. But, over the seasons, it became clear that, after escaping her rundown Riverdale roots, Julie only ever wanted a better life for her family. After her second marriage breakdown, we see a more vulnerable Julie move back to a trailer park, rebuild a relationship with Marissa, deal with a case of revenge porn, and save Kirsten Cohen (Kelly Rowan) from being scammed. A misunderstood 00s feminist icon, perhaps? “There’s a critical understanding of the show and its impact on feminism,” Clarke said in 2021. “It’s made me think, ‘Huh, was she really a character that was empowered?’ Julie is such a survivor. She’s like, ‘I am what I am. So, what? You can hate me, it doesn’t matter.’ I really envy that.”
The joy of The OC wasn’t just about its residents, though – the show had a huge cultural impact. From Vans pumps to Chanel bags, Missoni dresses and Lacoste polo shirts, everybody wanted to dress like a Californian rich kid. While costume designer Alexandra Welker admitted to using fakes in the pilot, she said that in later seasons “I had companies just throwing things at me. They were like, ‘Please, please use our stuff.’” So era-defining was the show’s wardrobe that it serves as a moodboard for the recent Y2K fashion resurgence (yep, including the low-rise jeans).
It was also a musical juggernaut. Music supervisor Alexandra Patsavas has said: “I struggled a bit in my earlier days to convince bands that a placement on a TV show wasn’t going to whittle away at their indie cred, that we were going to use [their] music respectfully.” But the Bait Shop club (run by Olivia Wilde’s rock chick Alex Kelly) went on to host a suspiciously large number of emerging bands that became huge, including The Killers, The Bravery, Modest Mouse, The Kills, The Subways and, of course, Death Cab for Cutie. Key scenes were sealed with tracks such as Imogen Heap’s Hide and Seek (in the scene where Marissa shot Trey, which was later parodied on SNL), Youth Group’s Forever Young (when Marissa and Ryan broke up) and – take a seat, Stranger Things – Placebo’s take on Running Up That Hill (Ryan and Julie seek revenge on Volchok). Even Beck premiered five new songs during one episode (or “Beckisode”). And who hasn’t screamed “Californiiaaaaa!” to Phantom Planet’s opening title anthem?
As with most TV shows that are “of their time”, though, it’s hard not to be sceptical when evaluating The OC’s legacy: it has a near total lack of diversity (every main character is white), no female character is any larger than a US size 2 and it doesn’t exactly approach its two LGBTQ+ storylines with any nuance (Luke’s dad’s affair with a man and Alex and Marissa’s brief relationship). There’s also the question of whether Seth really is as dreamy as we thought; today, he might be considered a “softboi”, who can’t believe women might listen to The Clash, thought it was OK to string along two women at the same time and is pissed off at his girlfriend for getting into the university that rejected him. “I wonder, looking back, if I watched it again, would I find him noble or if I would find him really selfish?” Brody once said.
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Criticisms have also been aimed at what was happening off-screen. Barton was 18 when she landed the part, with the rest of the fab four being in their early 20s. She became a 00s It girl, gracing the covers of Elle and Vogue – a poster girl for that moment in time. “It was a rocket ship, I think we all kind of hung on for dear life,” McKenzie said of the experience. “I’m just so glad you all survived, seriously,” Gallagher has said about the young cast’s fame. “I was worried about you guys the whole time .”
Barton left the show at the end of season three, which left such a hole in the series that it ended after its next – disappointingly woeful – run. A couple of years ago, Barton discussed “bullying from some of the men” on set and later revealed in a personal essay that she felt pressured by society and the media to lose her virginity because “the kids in the show were quintessential rich, privileged American teenagers drinking, taking drugs and, of course, having sex” and she felt a need to live up to that. She said: “I felt controlled within an inch of my life. At the same time, nobody was happy that there was so much media attention on me over other cast members … It was really when I started dating that the press started coming for me.”
This demands a second look at how young women in the media were treated while making such classic shows (“I think a lot of people deserve apologies for the things that were done to them at that time,” Barton said in 2021). But, earlier this year, she shared a fondness for the series when she joined her former co-stars Bilson and Clarke on their hit podcast, Welcome To The OC, Bitches! (the success of which shows just how much love there still is for the series), to take a celebratory look at her favourite Marissa moments. It has had more than 218,000 views on YouTube alone.
The highlights? Marissa screaming at Julie by the pool! The Ferris wheel kiss! (Ryan was scared of heights.) Both honourable mentions alongside those already detailed above. But it is Marissa’s death – which Barton claims she hadn’t seen since it first aired – that brings all three former leading women of Newport Beach to tears. “That middle part is really painful, when she asks him to stay with her,” Barton sobs. “I don’t want to see the part where he gets all emotional, I’m done now.”
When The OC ended in 2007, Schwartz took his concept of the outsider landing in an elite world to the east coast in Gossip Girl, which began the following year, and enjoyed global success. When it was rebooted in 2021, it received a tepid response. Could a reboot of The OC be on the cards? Speaking on a podcast earlier this year, Schwartz and Savage explained that they were not going to do that: “The OC was really just kind of specific to these characters and it feels like we made something, we’re really grateful that 20 years later, people are still watching the show and still want to talk about the show. And we’re just going to leave it right there.”
