Orange County Over

FOX cancelled The O.C. Ratings dropped and that’s all there was to it. Josh Schwartz made some graceful comment about how for a certain audience at a certain time it meant something, and he’s right. For a while there, Newport Beach felt like the only real place on earth.

The show had this ability to make four teenagers’ personal disasters feel urgent and important, not because they actually were but because the show knew exactly how to make you care. You cared whether Ryan and Marissa would end up together. You cared about Summer and Cohen. You bought the whole melodrama of it - the parties, the fighting, the way every minor betrayal felt apocalyptic. It was completely ridiculous and completely effective.

Then they killed Marissa Cooper and the show never recovered from it. I think everyone watching felt that shift immediately. The whole thing only worked if those four were in orbit around each other, and without her it just collapsed. The show kept running but it was already dead, just didn’t know it yet. I finished watching but I was going through the motions. The magic was gone.

There’s something I appreciated about what it did, though - the way it could make you feel like you were part of some world, some moment, even when you knew it was total fiction. The Tijuana trip, the brawls at parties. The mythology of California it built around everything. I learned something from it, some lesson about how television can trick you into caring about made-up people and places and you don’t feel stupid about it because it’s done well enough.

Now it’s over. California, here we come - that line’s a joke now since nobody’s coming anywhere. But that’s fine. I got what I needed from it. It had its moment and then it was done, and there’s no point keeping something alive past when it matters.