Happy 15th Birthday to The O.C., a Show That Ruined High School for Everybody
EntertainmentThe O.C. premiered on August 5, 2003, a simpler time in which we had flip phones and layered t-shirts and the idiot in the White House didn’t have access to Twitter. Today it turns 15, so if it were a person, it too could learn what I learned as a high-schooler who treated The O.C. as gospel: everything on this show was a goddamn lie.
Obviously, a fictional soap opera about rich kids living and loving in Newport Beach does not bode well for an accurate portrayal of high school, but when I watched the premiere 15 years ago, I was about to start ninth grade at a new, bigger school full of people who didn’t know me yet, and so to me, the adventures of a “bad boy” from Chino as he navigated an unfamiliar social circle offered up a lot of promise. I was fully aware that my high school experience probably wouldn’t include drama-filled trips to Tijuana, horrible mothers who slept with my ex-boyfriends, and Oliver, but I did think there’d be a couple Seth Cohens along the way. In fact, high school was 60 percent failing math tests, 30 percent secret crushes, and 10 percent waiting for the bus, and unlike Summer I did not magically get into Brown.
Another thing I don’t understand: The Bait Shop. The “club” appears to be a big thing on high school shows (The Bronze on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, for instance), but when I was in high school I could barely get into a PG-13 movie, let alone a club. Here’s to you, the Bait Shop:
Happy Birthday, The O.C., which lives on in Hulu streaming form, should you care to relive the high school experience you probably never had.