The Annotated O.C.

The fans’ ignorance of the meaning of the very acronym that is the title of The O.C. (the initials refer to the “Orange Coast,” the string of plush, mountain-backed beach towns along the Pacific Ocean) is symptomatic. Scarcely a single person connected with the making of The O.C.–whose exterior shots aren’t even taped on the O.C. but in Hermosa Beach, well to the north in Los Angeles County–knows much of anything about Orange County. The O.C. is a Hollywood fantasy about what life in the O.C. surely must be like–if anyone from Hollywood ever bothered to go there and find out.

Despite the fact that I grew up in Southern California, and my parents kept a 14-foot sailboat among the millionaires’ yachts at the docks of Newport Beach, I was a year-and-a-half late getting into the show. This meant that I completely missed such onetime regular, now written-out, characters as white-collar crook Jimmy Cooper (Tate Donovan), whose still-on-the-show ex-wife Julie (Melinda Clarke) was married to property-development tycoon Caleb Nichol (Alan Dale), until he had a heart attack several episodes ago, and also Dawn Atwood (Daphne Ashbrook), the alco-floozie mom of Ryan Atwood (Benjamin McKenzie), the show’s token juvenile delinquent from the wrong side of the tracks.

Indeed, I started watching the show only this past January, well after Julie’s daughter Marissa (Mischa Barton) had moved in with a lesbian named Alex (Olivia Wilde), even though Marissa was once heterosexual and had a boyfriend named Luke (Chris Carmack), who had been written out of the show like Jimmy and Dawn. Then I missed a couple of episodes in March, and lo–Marissa had became heterosexual again, or a least heterosexual enough to be locking lips with Ryan, Alex having gone the way of Luke.

You’re confused? Every Thursday night, when The O.C. appears on Fox, I have to grab a notebook and make both a genealogical chart and a flow chart in order to keep the characters straight.

I started watching The O.C. for two reasons: I found its neo-seventies music disturbingly reminiscent of the determinedly laid-back real seventies music that flooded my part of the country during that decade. The show’s opening song, “California” by Phantom Planet, is a near-clone of the Eagles’ “Hotel California,” and when I hear it, or the rest of the show’s ever-changing roster of vaguely edgy but fundamentally easy-listening tunes by Oasis, Jet, Spoon, and other groups, I’m transported back to that ghastly sub-sixties era when white guys grew their hair into enormous fluffy Afros that made them look like walking Hostess Sno Balls, and several of my respectably married friends from Pasadena and Westwood got into marijuana and creative divorce and ran off with firemen and tree trimmers.

Second, I became mesmerized by the maze of interlocking consanguineal, collateral, and intergenerational relationships among The O.C.‘s numerous characters. For example, Lindsay Gardner (Shannon Lucio), Ryan’s pre-Marissa girlfriend, turns out to be Caleb’s daughter by a former union–or so we think for now. Caleb is also the father, by yet another former union, of Kirsten (Kelley Rowan), wife of Ryan’s juvie-court lawyer, Sandy Cohen (Peter Gallagher). The Cohens have invited Ryan to live in their pool house (paid for with Caleb’s dough) as part of his rehab, and there he becomes best buddies with their dorky, irony-spouting son, Seth (Adam Brody). Seth, unimaginable as it may sound, was an item with Alex before she got into her lesbian phase and took up with Marissa.

It’s the House of Atreus, or it would be, if you could take the characters seriously enough to think of them as tragic. It’s actually more like Mount Olympus, where the gods, filthy rich and immortal, disport themselves and beget offspring endlessly with each other and with assorted nymphs, satyrs, and beautiful human creatures that cross their paths. That is, if the gods of Mount Olympus lived in stucco-and-chicken-wire mega-mansions topped with pseudo-Spanish fake tile roofs, as does everyone in The O.C.–and everyone on the real O.C. (The omnipresent fake tile is the one architectural feature of Orange County that the makers of The O.C. actually got spot-on.)

That eerie Olympian air of immortality pervades The O.C.‘s characters, nearly all of whom appear to be the same age as each other, even though they actually form two generations, a younger set (Ryan, Seth, Marissa, Alex, Lindsay, and Seth’s excruciatingly chirpy current girlfriend, Summer Roberts, played by Rachel Bilson–all of whom are supposed to be age 17 and attending a high school that features neither classes nor homework), and an older set of their parents and parents’ hookups, all of whom are presumably in their forties, at the very least, except for the white-haired Caleb, who is noticeably older. Nonetheless, all of the young people look to be at least 25 (the average age of the actors playing them) and none of the adults (except Caleb) looks older than 35.

This telescoping of generations works out a fantasy of post-Sixties parenting, in which the lines of cultural demarcation between parents and children are deliberately blurred; parents are their childrens’ pals. It also lends surface credence to the sorts of escapades in which the supposed 17-year-olds of The O.C. routinely engage: unchaperoned trips to Mexico and even Europe, massive parties where nary an adult is to be seen, and underage shacking up. When Marissa and Alex go Sapphic, they move into an apartment together. In real life, wouldn’t one of these gals’ moms or dads have to sign the lease? It goes without saying that the actual preoccupations of upscale 17-year-olds–SAT scores and college application essays–receive no attention whatsoever on The O.C.

When it comes to the demographics and politics of The O.C.‘s adults, the show goes seriously haywire and reveals its overlay of Hollywood phantasmagoria. Orange County was almost entirely rural until after World War II, and like Julius Caesar’s Gaul, it is divided into three parts. There’s North Orange County, inland, dusty, smoggy, dumpy, and flat. It’s the home of older towns like Anaheim, Santa Ana (the county seat), Yorba Linda (where Richard Nixon was born), and Whittier (where he went to college). The inhabitants are mostly white ex-rural types left over from Orange County’s orange-growing days, along with huge numbers of Mexican and Vietnamese immigrants. Then there’s hilly, newer, middle-income South Orange County, largely (although not entirely) a sprawling, mall-dotted retirement community; my father-in-law lives there, in Laguna Niguel. And finally, there’s the O.C., the Orange Coast itself, stretching from Newport Beach through Dana Point, where O.J. Simpson’s in-laws lived.

Thanks to Proposition 101, a draconian California coastal-preservation law passed during the early 1970s, all O.C. real estate is stupefyingly expensive. Despite the county’s tripartite socioeconomic division, nearly all its inhabitants vote the same way: Republican. There are a few blue islands here and there in the sea of red: Laguna Beach, a onetime starving-artists’ colony that’s now high-end boho, the University of California at Irvine, and the Hispanic neighborhoods of North Orange County (although in declining numbers, as we know from the last presidential election).

This is where the makers of The O.C. go awry, for they insist upon imposing on Orange County, whose riches are nearly all nouveau and entrepreneurial, the political template of Hollywood, where the elite is overwhelmingly on the left. It goes without saying that the businessman-characters of The O.C.–real-estate developer Caleb and investment-banker/fraud-artist Jimmy–are cold, rapacious, and unattractive. The show’s lone adult goody-goody, criminal-defense lawyer Sandy, is, by contrast, a liberal’s dream: He’s “idealistic” (Hollywood’s favorite virtue), seemingly taking most of his cases for free; he surfs every morning–for the mystical experience–when most guys are commuting to work; he takes criminals into his home, not just Ryan but Ryan’s jailbird older brother, Trey (Bradley Stryker); and he yearns nostalgically for his student days at UC-Berkeley, where his favorite underground magazine was called Revolution, whose radical-flamethrower editor, the improbably-named Carter Buckley (Bill Campbell), has shown up years later to write for Newport Living magazine, owned by Julie, and to flirt with Kirsten. (All this, of course, makes Sandy–and Carter–more like 60 years old than 40, but no matter.) Trouble is: No one like Sandy–or Carter, for that matter–exists in Orange County, except perhaps on the UC-Irvine faculty.

If the makers of The O.C. grossly misunderstand the values and lifestyles of Orange County’s suntanned upper echelon, they seem unaware of the existence of any of its other demographic or cultural components. Nary a Hispanic maid or gardener is to be seen on the immaculate Cohen and Nicol premises–not to mention, say, a Vietnamese honor student at the high school, a Coast Guard crew in the Newport Harbor, or a Marine or two from Camp Pendleton at the very south of the Orange Coast. As for religion, well, we know that Sandy is Jewish because his last name is Cohen, and Caleb (note the stern New England Puritan moniker) seems to be a Protestant of the grim Max Weber variety. In a notorious episode last December, the interfaith Cohen household celebrated “Chrismukkah,” a caricatured Christian-Jewish holiday that spawned quite a bit of Internet discussion among Christians and Jews, who were not amused. In contrast to the thoroughgoing secularism of The O.C.’s characters, real-life Orange County bursts with megachurches and evangelical colleges.

The O.C. is a soap opera, and it would be heavy-handed of me to use it as a platform for complaining that liberal Hollywood doesn’t understand red-state America, even the red-state America that’s right at its back door. And it’s probably too much, especially in these last decadent days of network television, where Ally McBeal-style archness is the new seriousness, to expect a mere soap opera to convey any sense of genuine family dynamics and a rich regional culture, although not long ago the better prime-time soaps, such as Dallas and Falcon Crest, did exactly that. But it does seem striking that the makers of The O.C. never bothered to drive a few miles down the freeways to find out what the real O.C. might be like. Instead, they gave us the usual Hollywood picture: flattened-out generational lines, wan, politicized stereotypes of good and evil.

Charlotte Allen is author, most recently, of The Human Christ.