Summer’s Over

Next week, The O.C. ends in America. Germany gets the finale in June on Saturday afternoons—a strange time for a show that mattered, a quiet way of saying goodbye. Austria gets it earlier. Maybe they’re kinder to their doomed shows.

The finale is apparently brutal. Everyone gets a moment before it’s over. Seth’s in trouble with the cops. Ryan’s mom shows up. Marissa gets a marriage proposal that might change everything. Summer falls apart because Seth’s leaving, and she knows she’s losing him. Sandy makes some kind of decision that breaks Kirsten. Then they graduate high school and the show just ends, replacing them with Kaitlin and her friends in season four. Except Fox hasn’t greenlit season four yet, and the ratings were already weak.

So that’s it. Ryan, Marissa, Seth, Summer—the whole reason anyone watched—are done. Three seasons, and then the show decides it’s better to start over with characters nobody cares about than to let itself breathe. The ratings couldn’t hold up. The story had nowhere left to go. Josh Schwartz saw the ending coming and planned for this.

I’m sad about it in the way you get sad about things you’ve spent time with. Three years of watching these people destroy their own lives and somehow make it matter. The show was always kind of stupid, but it knew how to make you care anyway. Now it’s going away, and whatever replaces it won’t be the same. Moving it to Saturday afternoon—when most people are outside in summer, when it’s easy to skip—feels like proof that everyone’s already given up.

But maybe that’s right. Maybe the mercy is knowing when to end instead of dragging everything out until nobody remembers why they loved it. I’ll watch it when it gets to Germany. I’ll be sad. And I’ll accept that this version of The O.C.—the one that mattered—ends the way it should.