I Like to Watch

Heather Havrilesky has a great wrap up in Salon today about the season finale of The O.C. last night. It sounds atrocious, and it seems that Marissa was finally killed off in the last 10 minutes of the show, which, even though I stopped watching the show a season and a half ago, I'm thrilled to hear about. I couldn't stand Mischa Barton, and agree that she and that Ryan guy had about as much chemistry as a rock and a blade of grass. Although that might be giving them a little credit. Mischa Barton's idea of acting was to basically stare blankly at the wall/ocean/toilet into which she was puking and look confused. Heather's money quote:

all she could muster was wide-eyed looks of desperation and tears, lots of 'em. Barton could really turn on the waterworks but that was about it, and every scene with her in it had a way of reminding you that you had a Pop Tart in the toaster or laundry in the dryer.

Last summer when all I wanted to do was lie on my couch and watch TV and drink whisky, I started watching the first season of The OC on DVD, and was totally hooked. Their over-the-top hysterics and overwrought drama was just what I needed at the time, and in the finale of the first season, when Ryan goes back to whatever ghetto he came from, and Seth sailed away into the wild blue yonder on his sailboat, and Jeff Buckley's "Hallelujah" wailed out of the soundtrack, I have to admit, they really got me. I totally wept, for them and for me. Yes, I felt their pain, and despair and loss. I loved it. (Yes, I'm being melodramatic; but I'm serious.)

But somewhere around the middle of the second season, when the porn tapes from the 80's started popping up, and Ryan just kept getting into fistfights, and kept getting bailed out by Sandy, and blah blah blah, I totally lost interest and stopped watching. Apparently season 3 was just more of the same, and many have speculated that this will be the last season. Heather makes a point that the show, despite being called "Douglas Sirk on acid" by some idiotic and uninspired critic somewhere, never really went far enough, that the kids were actually quite bland and boring, and too goody-goody for their own good. I agree. In a show like The OC, you really wanna see the blood and guts and mean-spirited backstabbing that truly make up teenage life. Also, the adults could have been much more interesting. Julie Cooper was a pretty wicked villain (and HOT!), but ultimately, all she really cared about was money, and that just gets boring.

So, I have no idea how to wrap this up, because I have no idea why I'm writing it in the first place. I'm bored.