On The O.C. (in observance of the fifth anniversary of the series finale)

photo: The WB

The final episode of The O.C., "The End's Not Near, It's Here," aired five years ago today on Feb. 22, 2007.


It's difficult for me to believe that it's been five years since I last hung out with Ryan, Seth, Summer, Sandy, Kirsten and Julie, but that's probably because I haven't spent the last five years without them. I have probably thought about them at one point or another every day since then. As weird/sad/awesome as it is to say, those characters and that show became a part of me.

So many moments from The O.C.'s run are iconic to me: from "Welcome to the O.C., bitch" and Ryan carrying Marissa after her overdose to Captain Oats and Chrismukkah to the New Year's Eve kiss and Seth and Ryan's horror at discovering Luke and Julie's affair. From Seth sailing away and Marissa's poolside freak out to Ryan chasing Marissa around with a giant penguin and Seth and Summer's Spider-Man kiss. The list goes on and on and features so many of my favorite moments ever on television.

I know The O.C. wasn't flawless. There were missteps: the Marissa-goes-to-public-school arc, many of the Sandy/Kirsten love triangle attempts, Sandy running the Newport Group... Season 3 was rough in general. And I will probably never agree that killing Marissa off was the right thing to do for the story. I'll readily admit that some of the other shows I've watched have more consistently maintained a higher level of quality than The O.C. did during its duration - Breaking Bad, Arrested Development, Community, Mad Men, and certain stretches of Lost, for example.

But, still, The O.C. remains my favorite of them all. Because when I define "favorite" as the show that has most infiltrated the various aspects of my life, The O.C. takes the title in a landslide. It has impacted the actors I like, the movies and TV shows I've watched, the music I listen to, the books I've read, the things I laugh at, the way I talk, and the way I think.


The O.C. premiered the summer before I started college and ended a couple of months after I graduated, and different moments from the show remain forever tied to different moments in my life. I remember watching the pilot in the summer of 2003 (coincidentally right before I took my own trip to Orange County) and being excited by the unexpected awesomeness the show offered. I remember being rendered so desperate by my lack of a working television during my first week of freshman year that I made a rare attempt at socializing with other people on my floor just so I'd have somewhere to watch The O.C. Just hearing the opening strains of "Honey and the Moon" sends me instantly back to my freshman dorm room, where I obsessively listened to The O.C. soundtrack while studying for finals. I remember my four different dorm rooms that I watched the show in, and I know which one I was in when Marissa shot Trey and where I was sitting when Marissa died. And I remember watching the finale five years ago and bawling like a little child during Ryan's flashbacks in the Cohen house (the image of Marissa standing on the curb while Ryan drives away gets me every freaking time).


I started this blog a couple of months after The O.C. concluded its run, so I don't have an blow-by-blow online account of my adoration for the show like I do for Greek and So You Think You Can Dance and others. But it's rather telling that in the past five years, after it's last episode had aired, I still managed to mention The O.C. and its characters in 86 posts on this blog. (This post makes number 87.)

The O.C.'s Season 1 finale was called "The Ties That Bind," and some pretty formidable ties continue to bind me to this show. So how will I observe this milestone? By watching the series finale. I think it will be the first time I've watched the entire episode since it aired five years ago, a fact that's especially surprising considering that I've probably watched many episodes of this show upwards of a dozen times. But I've never been really excited to watch the finale again, although I absolutely loved it. I think I just never wanted to remind myself that the show was actually gone. But on this anniversary I think I can handle watching the finale again, because after five years it's clear that The O.C. has become part of my identity and, to me, it will never truly be gone.