“Welcome to the O.C., (expletive).”
That iconic TV line – no, really, Google it if you’re not easily offended – was uttered by the character Luke Ward right after he kicked the ribs of recent Chino transplant Ryan Atwood to end their get-to-know-you beach brawl during the premiere of “The O.C.” 20 years ago on Fox.
Then, to help any viewers still struggling to grasp that intricate message, Ward stood over Atwood, flexed a little, and said:
“This is how we do it in Orange County.”
Even by the standards of TV melodrama, “The O.C.” was a complex beast – gleefully tongue-in-cheek, soapy, teen-tastic, kinda lame (Season 3 didn’t work), simultaneously White-centric and multicultural. But subtle? No.
In theory, all that “welcome” stuff served the narrative, giving viewers a smash-cut straight into the heart of “The O.C.,” a story mostly about teens (who looked to be in their mid-to-late 20s) told mostly for teens (who wished they were in their mid-to-late 20s), set in (though almost never filmed in) a gloriously swanky version of Newport Beach.
But in reality, the line simply lit the fuse of a soon-to-explode pop culture bomb – Orange County.
Though it was hard to see at the time, and it doesn’t feel that way today, during the three-plus years that “The O.C.” was winning over teenagers (and others) around the globe, Orange County was trendy.
Think of it this way: Before that night, Aug. 5, 2003, California’s Orange County might’ve been lumped in with the seven other Orange counties in the United States. But once “The O.C.” landed, that was impossible.
With all that in mind, and now that the show is almost old enough to drink (as if that mattered in “The O.C.”), here are four things the show did that still resonate:
1. It made us cool, briefly
The distance between the geographic center of Orange County (The Outlets at Orange, if you’re wondering) and the symbolic center of Hollywood (TCL Chinese Theatre)…
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