When “The O.C.” debuted three years ago on the Fox TV network, the soapy teen drama was an immediate hit and attracted so much attention that Fox hoped it would become “Beverly Hills, 90210” for a new generation.
It has not turned out that way.
Now in season four, the show has plummeted in the ratings, with much of its young-adult audience vanishing, and the buzz that came with it gone too.
Of the 119 shows aired by broadcast networks, “The O.C.” ranks No. 96 according to Nielsen Media Research – a position so low it risks being canceled, though the News Corp. network is publicly supportive. Fox notes that even with its low ratings the program is luring a bigger audience in its highly competitive Thursday time slot against the popular “Grey’s Anatomy” and “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” than the show it replaced.
What went wrong at “The O.C.”? A series of decisions – involving story lines, scheduling and casting – appears to have hobbled the program further as it slid.
“Shows aimed at young adults and teenagers are particularly fragile,” says John Rash, director of broadcast negotiations at Interpublic Group’s Campbell Mithun, a Minneapolis ad-placement agency. “In the case of ‘The O.C.,’ I think there were several mistakes.” Among them, he says: The storytelling has been uneven and the show’s time slot shifted too often.
Nobody agrees more than Josh Schwartz, the show’s 30-year-old creator and executive producer. In a business where people rarely accept responsibility for missteps, Schwartz concedes his fair share. “Last season I wasn’t as focused as I should have been,” he says. “I’ve learned a lot about what to do and what not to do.”
Schwartz had almost no TV experience before “The O.C.” As a result, he says, he didn’t have a clear idea of how his high school soap opera would unfold.
Would the quartet of quirky teens at the show’s center progress a school year with each season, or would they linger in high school perpetually, the usual case with teen dramas? Schwartz decided on the former, which has introduced its own complexities since two of the characters have moved on to college.
Complicating matters, Schwartz decided early on to tackle dual plot lines. Along with chronicling the privileged lives of teens in a posh beach town in Orange County, the show would also examine the lives of their parents. Keeping all those balls in the air, however, proved difficult.
When the adult story line started to sag, Schwartz opted to write a popular character off of the show. (Caleb Nichol, the evil patriarch, suffered a heart attack in his infinity-edge pool.) Schwartz stands by that decision as smart. Not so, perhaps, was his move to kill off another character, Marissa Cooper, a hard-partying, hard-shopping mess played by Mischa Barton. From following online chat rooms he says he knows that some fans, particularly teenage girls, were annoyed.
Executive changes at Fox also roiled the mix. New management wanted new characters, and Schwartz was asked to add a character and cast a brand-name celebrity in the part.
The problem: Schwartz had outlined seven full episodes and had to figure out how to insert the character without destroying the story lines. “We didn’t really have an option,” Schwartz says.
Actress Jeri Ryan ended up joining the show as a con artist – which many fans thought was a clunky and unbelievable plot twist. Ryan has since moved on to the CBS drama “Shark.”
Perhaps the biggest buzz killer for “The O.C.” has been Fox’s schedule.
As with other Fox shows, “The O.C.” has gone off the air each fall when the network airs Major League Baseball playoffs. “The O.C.” has particular trouble maintaining ratings momentum with the interruption because its young fans can be fickle, says Rash.
Other networks were only too happy to steal the audience of “The O.C.” in the interim.
Indeed, if there is a success story to be told, it’s the popularity of shows that “The O.C.” spawned: MTV’s reality series “Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County,” based on a group of Laguna Beach high school students that just wrapped up its third season and Bravo’s “The Real Housewives of Orange County,” which will return for a second season next month.
