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December 13, 2006
Love for The OC appears to have been a Fad
Maybe the Angels knew what they were doing when they were trying to distance themselves from Anaheim and instead trying to fool people into thinking they were part of Los Angeles.
The LA Times reported yesterday that the Fox show that first got Orange County into the national consciousness, "The OC" is currently 97th among prime-time shows with just 3.7 million tuning-in to FOX on Thursdays, choosing instead to spend time with "Grey's Anatomy", "C.S.I." or "Scrubs".
Maybe it was because the 20 year old Mischa Barton always seemed about 10 years older. Which isn't a bad thing, we're just saying.
Maybe it was because Adam Brody never really took off as the teen heartthrob everyone claimed he was about to be, and nobody cared when he began dating and later broke up with co-star Rachel Bison. Instead the "honor" of teen heartthrob went to the dudes of "Lost", Zach Braff, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Wilmer Valderrama.
Or maybe it was because the same kids that "The OC" was targeting were wooed away by MTV's "Laguna Beach, The Real Orange County" and its spinoff "The Hills". And now it looks like they're watching neither of those shallow disposable shows, and instead they're making "friends" on MySpace and updating their status on Facebook.
Whatever the reason, Orange County is no longer What's Hot, and they're slowly reverting to what they used to be: What's Not. Cuz after you've seen one group of surface-y, overrated, underachieving, unworthy, spoiled, rich white kids who listen to lame music, you've seen 'em all.
photo by Evan G
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you could tell that show was tanking once the record labels stopped trying to funnel decent music into the soundtrack
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I'm going to be none too pleased if they stop bringing me my weekly doses of Autumn Reeser.
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The music supervisor for The OC, Alex Patsavas, also does the music for Grey's Anatomy and it's obvious where the hip stuff is getting funneled right now... I think a lot of these bands that are popular now are just knockoffs of bands that The OC introduced three years ago - bands that weren't that great to begin with but were something different at least. I don't wanna start any fires by naming names, but a lot of these "indie" bands right now remind me of Crash Test Dummies hell of mid school.
The OC was great... and had great music, but burnt out, got popular, and jumped the shark all in one deep breath! The First season covered three or four seasons worth of drama - it was amazing and had kids and parents watching together because it was fun and sexy and exciting and viewers could really connect with the characters (sure those characters were superficial and jaded and sometimes snarky, but that's something we could either relate to or aspire to be! Maybe the critics hate on these spoiled, stuck up OCers, but they were popular and sexy and what else could you want in high school?!), but like anything else that get popular someone in a Brooks Brothers suit somewhere tried to dilute it enough to be palpable by the doltish, insipid retards in the middle of the country with neilson boxes and WalMart-level buying power.
The actors got ego and demanded "depth" in the form of really cheesy drama and a revolving door of fugly random love interests with a lifespan of 3-6 episodes. The powerful, sexy, quirky family that viewers were so attracted to became vulnerable in every way - I'm guessing a focus group or a douchebag curmudgeon exec decided that "people want to be able to relate to The OC," and it immediately stopped being an escape, a fantasy that we [viewers] wanted to be a part of, and became dysfunctional, and white-trashy and absolutely uninteresting in every way. The once lusty, seductive characters lost everything - power, popularity, money, love, family - and the show left us with a bunch of broken, used, pathetic individuals... in a season they shifted from the golden couples and the royalty of the school to the the punching-bags of the rest of the community, and the kids you look away from as they walk down the hall to their lockers. Relatable, definitely, but enticing? Hardly. Girls don't want a 5'4" 140lb Barbie doll, guys don't have posters of accountants on their walls, they have Reggie Bush up there.
Wacky adventures and last-week pop references that Leno call trite found their way into the OC, along with an incredible series of handjob dudes and fuggo chicks drawing the couple that made the show apart... I remember seeing the very first promo for The OC in the summer of 2003 - i was a hater then, but i recall it vividly - "The OC. like no place you've ever been." When that was true, it was awesome, but as soon as I began to look at this fantasy world with pity, i was so over it.
Yeah, and the tsumani marketing of everything OC / Emo didn't help... Love it or hate it, the show put great music and a new fashion in the hands of America's 13 thru 24-year-olds, and that's like giving them live grenades...
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Come on, Perez, stop posting as "Big Steve."
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A) I'm a photoshop professional and Perez's paintbrushed on text in his pictures makes me nauseous, and B) I don't think that chubby queen has the attention span to string together two sentences, much less five rambling paragraphs.... just sayin'.