shallowness (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
shallowness) wrote2018-12-08 10:25 am
shallowness) wrote2018-12-08 10:25 am
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The OC Season 4 disc 1
The next DVD boxset on my 'To Watch' pile was Burn Notice season 3, but as all the dramas I’ve been watching lately are spy or spy-adjacent adventures, I needed a change, and skipped to The OC season 4. It’s the first time I’ve rewatched the show since it aired, apart from seeing bits of a subbed episode somewhere on holiday. I accept the first season was probably the best, but this was the season of Ryan/Taylor, which I loved to bits, so I bought the DVDs second hand.
Anyway, the rewatch is an exercise in nostalgia – I’m still enjoying the title song – and imbued with an awareness of all that has happened since. Who would have thought that Chris Pratt, guesting here as the unfunny Ché, the dim-witted ecoactivist going to the same universityy as Summer, would turn out to be an A-list star, appearing in a ‘The Avengers’ film (an episode title)? Seth Cohen would have choked on his tacos.
It’s also been a lesson that I’d forgotten some things, such as that Julie was living with Summer’s dad and kept his house after he left the show out of sheer Julie Cooperness. I’d conflated others, mainly Ryan’s cage-fighting with Mexico; they were two separate things. Other things I’d remembered fine, but it was fun to revisit them.
I’m going to go disc by disc, as is my wont, but the first three episodes of this season belong together, with the fourth going off in a new direction. In ‘The Avengers’ there was a massive disconnect between me and several main characters. Ryan, Summer and Julie were grieving after Marissa’s death. Just like eleven or so years ago, I was like ‘Whee! You’ve jettisoned the weakest actress and most draining character, why the sad faces?’ Their poor ways of dealing with their grief were having an impact on all the other characters. and I found myself really feeling for Seth, trying to make his parents feel less awful that Ryan had left them, trying to maintain some connection with an unresponsive Ryan, oh, and his girlfriend was on the other side of the country and acting strangely. There was also the tragedy that in grieving one daughter, Julie was neglecting parenting the other.
It felt like Taylor was from some other show entirely, one that showed glimpses of itself when Summer bossed Ryan all the way back to the Cohens. Before that, the show teased us with the possibility that Julie and Ryan were…sleeping together, until reassuring us that no, they were merely in cahoots. She wanted him to kill her daughter’s killer. I love Julie Cooper, but I never claimed her moral compass was anything less than wonky.
‘The Gringos’ was the season 4 Mexican episode, in which Ryan went there to kill Volchek and the Cohens followed him to stop him. I might not partake in their characters’ grief, but Clarke and McKenzie conveyed it well, while Brody, Bilson and Reeser were sparky on the comic front. But the show had a problem in that the comedy and drama were tugging in different directions.
Another problem was that this was its post-high school season, and the show, like so many, struggled with that. One of its main characters had gone, and her peers were in stasis, with only Summer having ‘left’ for university – I’d have more sympathy for her greenwashing if she didn’t fly in nearly every episode – while Ryan and Seth were in time-marking jobs, deferring their next step and Taylor had done a 180 after messing up in France. The characters’ lives were on hold so that they could carry on creating the show as was. As it happened, the show got cancelled and didn’t have to work out a way of showing the teens as adults beyond the finale.
‘Cold Turkey’ was the Thanksgiving episode. As Volchek turned himself in with Sandy’s help, Ryan, Julie and Summer, especially the latter two, had to face their grief. Meanwhile, Taylor had been sleeping under Seth’s bed (but of course), Kirsten found out and got embroiled in Taylor’s awesome freakishness/telling her mother that, whoops, she married a Frenchman by accident. Given what would ensue, it was amusing that Ryan kind of blanked Taylor when she turned up in the Cohens’ kitchen.
There was wackiness, but the Cohens did being a family right and nearly everyone had their dinner there. It felt like the show was going to set aside a lot of the angst from this point on.
‘The Metamorphosis’ was mainly about Summer, and I felt that her storyline was forced. I did laugh once at Ché, interacting with a nonplussed Seth, but his being there screamed of the network wanting to do something, anything with Pratt after Everwood. Sandy had a plotline that expresses some of the show’s uncertainty about what to do with itself, but Julie’s (bad) notion of responsible parenting and Kaitlyn’s response was more fun.
Best of all was the origin of Taylor/Ryan! She saved him from montages by being in a pickle over her divorce. Lost and vulnerable, she asked him for help and then, being Taylor, tried to get him to unknowingly pretend to have been her lover to get the divorce through. He said he couldn’t cope with all this, but ended up helping her anyway – I like Ryan Attwood so much more than Jim Gordon, BTW.
They so work. He was pretending to be an immovable object, but she is a force to be reckoned with. There’s a melancholy kernel to the screwball romance and both actors bounce well off each other. The big reason for buying the DVDs stands up!
And yes, I was motivated to post 'EXHIBIT: Sharp-suited Man' because I watned to rewatch this.
Anyway, the rewatch is an exercise in nostalgia – I’m still enjoying the title song – and imbued with an awareness of all that has happened since. Who would have thought that Chris Pratt, guesting here as the unfunny Ché, the dim-witted ecoactivist going to the same universityy as Summer, would turn out to be an A-list star, appearing in a ‘The Avengers’ film (an episode title)? Seth Cohen would have choked on his tacos.
It’s also been a lesson that I’d forgotten some things, such as that Julie was living with Summer’s dad and kept his house after he left the show out of sheer Julie Cooperness. I’d conflated others, mainly Ryan’s cage-fighting with Mexico; they were two separate things. Other things I’d remembered fine, but it was fun to revisit them.
I’m going to go disc by disc, as is my wont, but the first three episodes of this season belong together, with the fourth going off in a new direction. In ‘The Avengers’ there was a massive disconnect between me and several main characters. Ryan, Summer and Julie were grieving after Marissa’s death. Just like eleven or so years ago, I was like ‘Whee! You’ve jettisoned the weakest actress and most draining character, why the sad faces?’ Their poor ways of dealing with their grief were having an impact on all the other characters. and I found myself really feeling for Seth, trying to make his parents feel less awful that Ryan had left them, trying to maintain some connection with an unresponsive Ryan, oh, and his girlfriend was on the other side of the country and acting strangely. There was also the tragedy that in grieving one daughter, Julie was neglecting parenting the other.
It felt like Taylor was from some other show entirely, one that showed glimpses of itself when Summer bossed Ryan all the way back to the Cohens. Before that, the show teased us with the possibility that Julie and Ryan were…sleeping together, until reassuring us that no, they were merely in cahoots. She wanted him to kill her daughter’s killer. I love Julie Cooper, but I never claimed her moral compass was anything less than wonky.
‘The Gringos’ was the season 4 Mexican episode, in which Ryan went there to kill Volchek and the Cohens followed him to stop him. I might not partake in their characters’ grief, but Clarke and McKenzie conveyed it well, while Brody, Bilson and Reeser were sparky on the comic front. But the show had a problem in that the comedy and drama were tugging in different directions.
Another problem was that this was its post-high school season, and the show, like so many, struggled with that. One of its main characters had gone, and her peers were in stasis, with only Summer having ‘left’ for university – I’d have more sympathy for her greenwashing if she didn’t fly in nearly every episode – while Ryan and Seth were in time-marking jobs, deferring their next step and Taylor had done a 180 after messing up in France. The characters’ lives were on hold so that they could carry on creating the show as was. As it happened, the show got cancelled and didn’t have to work out a way of showing the teens as adults beyond the finale.
‘Cold Turkey’ was the Thanksgiving episode. As Volchek turned himself in with Sandy’s help, Ryan, Julie and Summer, especially the latter two, had to face their grief. Meanwhile, Taylor had been sleeping under Seth’s bed (but of course), Kirsten found out and got embroiled in Taylor’s awesome freakishness/telling her mother that, whoops, she married a Frenchman by accident. Given what would ensue, it was amusing that Ryan kind of blanked Taylor when she turned up in the Cohens’ kitchen.
There was wackiness, but the Cohens did being a family right and nearly everyone had their dinner there. It felt like the show was going to set aside a lot of the angst from this point on.
‘The Metamorphosis’ was mainly about Summer, and I felt that her storyline was forced. I did laugh once at Ché, interacting with a nonplussed Seth, but his being there screamed of the network wanting to do something, anything with Pratt after Everwood. Sandy had a plotline that expresses some of the show’s uncertainty about what to do with itself, but Julie’s (bad) notion of responsible parenting and Kaitlyn’s response was more fun.
Best of all was the origin of Taylor/Ryan! She saved him from montages by being in a pickle over her divorce. Lost and vulnerable, she asked him for help and then, being Taylor, tried to get him to unknowingly pretend to have been her lover to get the divorce through. He said he couldn’t cope with all this, but ended up helping her anyway – I like Ryan Attwood so much more than Jim Gordon, BTW.
They so work. He was pretending to be an immovable object, but she is a force to be reckoned with. There’s a melancholy kernel to the screwball romance and both actors bounce well off each other. The big reason for buying the DVDs stands up!
And yes, I was motivated to post 'EXHIBIT: Sharp-suited Man' because I watned to rewatch this.