The End Is Not Near. It Is Here.

There were a bunch of retrospectives on The O.C. popping up around cyberspace this week as last night's finale approached. I particularly liked this run-down of the top ten episodes and this review of the impact of The O.C. on popular culture.

Lest we all forget though, The O.C. did not, in fact, spawn a brand new genre of TV. Instead, I watched the birth of that genre way back in 1990 with 90210. And yet going back to watch those old Shannon-Doherty-era episodes now, they seem so delightfully naive. The O.C. is so much more clever, ironic, and self-aware. Josh Schwartz consistently used Summer and Marissa's fascination with the teen soap The Valley and Seth's Atomic County comic to remind us that the show didn't take itself too seriously. Then, in last week's episode, we heard Seth and Ryan remark that if they had managed to swap bodies when Ryan received a blood transfusion from Seth, they "could have gotten a couple more years out of it." Brilliant. But this sort of "show-within-a-show" self-awareness in a teen soap did not start with The O.C. Instead, Dawson's Creek really started that trend: the cold open for many of those episodes had some sort of self-aware commentary about how everyone on the show talked too much, and then, of course, film-maker Dawson went on to Hollywood to produce a hit TV show called The Creek.

The other innovation for which The O.C. is getting a lot of credit is its use of the soundtrack to both promote indie bands and reinforce the character and plot development of the show. I'm sure The O.C. was not the first to do this consciously, but it did do it very well. An example: at our old house, N would generally sit in his office playing games on his computer while I watched prime time TV. He pointedly would not sit in the room with me, but he pointedly left the office door open. During Gilmore Girls, I would frequently hear him chuckling to himself. Occasionally over dinner he'd even ask me about plot points that he had trouble following simply by listening to Gilmore. But for the most part, he simply ignored the other shows. That is, until the day that Jeff Buckley's Hallelujah showed up on The O.C. N actually got up out of his chair and came out of his office to find out what I was watching and who was singing. The music was that compelling. I will miss it. For now I'll have to rely on One Tree Hill, which does its soundtrack almost as well as The O.C. did, for my anthematic indie music listening experience.

Last night's episode was a delight. It had appeared that Fox had spoiled the episode with a trailer that gave everything away, but instead the episode was filled with quirky, unexpected twists (like Summer and Seth living together while Taylor had taken off for Paris). The move to Berkeley was not unexpected, but the move back to the house where Sandy and Kirsten had first lived was a great twist on that. I laughed out loud as they moved back in to the house before the gay couple living there had agreed to sell, with Kirsten giving birth in one room, Ryan getting laid in another room, and Julie almost getting married in the back yard. I'm sad to see the end of The O.C. As the montage at the end fast-forwarded through 6 or 7 years, I was disappointed that I won't get to watch the writers and actors play out the stories in between. After a terrible season last year, the writing this season has been smart and funny.

But smart and funny exists on other shows too. Have I mentioned that if you're not watching Friday Night Lights you're missing the best show on TV?