California, Here We Came

FOX cancelled The O.C. The ratings had been declining for a season and everyone could see it coming, but the official announcement still landed like something.

Creator Josh Schwartz was gracious about it. For a certain audience, at a certain time, The O.C. meant something. And for that we’re grateful, he said, and added that you should stop while you’re ahead—easy to say when the decision isn’t yours, but he wasn’t wrong about the first part.

I’ll miss Newport Beach. Not the later seasons—the show stopped being itself when Marissa died, and I knew it even as I kept watching. But the early years were genuinely great television: Ryan showing up in that neighborhood like a grenade with a quiet face, the Cohens and their strange over-verbal warmth, Seth Cohen as a very specific kind of nerd wish-fulfillment that actually worked. The absurd violence of the high-society parties. The road trip to Tijuana. The slow, doomed weight of Ryan and Marissa all the way to the end.

It all played out to music I still have in playlists somewhere. That’s what I’ll actually remember—not the plots, but the feeling of watching it late at night, the specific mood those episodes made. California, here we came.