As ‘The O.C.’ turns 20, did the show get Orange County right?

“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) is exactly 37.3 miles. So maybe proximity is why Orange County has always seemed to punch above its weight, pop culture-wise.

Long before that debut night for “The O.C.” all or parts of the county had been a subject, directly or indirectly, of countless movies and TV shows, as well as steamy novels (“Laguna Heat”), twangy EMO songs (“Mission Viejo”) and so-so attempts at fine art.

The 1949 noir non-classic “The Reckless Moment” featured a murder on Balboa Island. In 1986, “Gleaming the Cube” centered on late 1980s skate culture in Orange County. And the 1996 blockbuster “Independence Day” felt the need for fighter pilots from El Toro Marine Base to wipe out some space aliens.

Even on the night that “The O.C.” premiered, two 2002 movies – “Better Luck Tomorrow” and the aptly named “Orange County” – were still playing in dollar theaters, each telling semi-realistic stories about slices of county life.

But all that was prelude.

“The O.C.” debut received decent-to-strong reviews. Far more important, it also got better-than-decent ratings, with more than 9 million people (most, apparently, between the ages of 10 and 20) watching Luke and Ryan rumble on opening night.

Soon, TV executives couldn’t get enough of Orange County.

“Arrested Development,” also set in Newport Beach and also on Fox, aired its first episode 12 weeks after the debut of “The O.C.” In 2004, MTV started airing “Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County.” And by 2006, Bravo launched a franchise with “The Real Housewives of Orange County.” Those led to several (smaller) real estate-oriented reality shows, a nursing-oriented reality show (“Scrubbing In”), and “Storage Wars,” about buying junk – all set, at least some of the time, in Orange County. Later, dramatic fare, like the current “Dead to Me,” and a couple animated shows, “Rocket Power” and “Son of Zorn.” At some point, amidst all that, “The Sopranos” was name-checking Mission Viejo and Tony Soprano himself was having coma-induced hallucination in Costa Mesa.

In short, “The O.C.” turned Orange County into an “it” setting for TV. And, by virtue of that, it made Orange County cool.

People who track TV say none of that was, or is, particularly weird.

“Both ‘Magnum, P.I.’ and, of course, ‘Hawaii Five-O’ were about a particular place, Hawaii, and they came out fairly close to each other. And a lot of the sitcoms from the 1970s, like ‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show’ and ‘WKRP in Cincinnati,’ were set in specific places, but they all seemed to have a similar Midwest feel,” said Heather Osborne-Thompson, a professor who teaches about television at Cal State Fullerton’s Department of Cinema and Television Arts.

“I think you see this kind of thing happening fairly often.”

Maybe, but TV “it-factor” stuff usually happens to other places. “The O.C.” happened to Orange County. If the show had been called “The Fresno” or “The Chula Vista” you wouldn’t be reading this story from this news organization.

It also wouldn’t have been as big.

2. It created a stupid nickname

Let’s dispense with this now; before the show, “The O.C.,” the phrase “the O.C.” was not in wide use, at least not by anybody connected with the county.

Josh Schwartz, the Rhode Island native who wrote and created “The O.C.” has told publications that came up with the idea for the show – and the title – after hearing his USC frat brothers say “the O.C.” when talking about where they were from. If true, they were very early adopters.

“Never said ‘the O.C.’ in my life. And I never heard it,” said Gordie Balmer, 52, an investor who grew up in Garden Grove and now lives in a Newport Coast neighborhood similar to the one portrayed in “The O.C.”

“Thought it was kinda weird when I heard it on the show,” he added.

But after?

These days, a lot of people – OK, mostly people who aren’t from Orange County – use the “the O.C.” The shift says a lot about the power of television, and about the story Schwartz managed to tell.

“We say ‘The O.C.,’ but we think it means all of California,” Ana Melic said via email. Melic, 38, saw the show when she was growing up in a town near Zagreb, Croatia.

Melic’s mistake, if it is one, is understandable. The version of the show she watched came from Germany and was called “O.C. California.” It was one of 50 international markets – with more than a billion potential viewers – that over the past 20 years has aired “The O.C.” in international syndication.

But much like McDonald’s franchisees in France call the Quarter Pounder a McRoyale – sorry, not the Royale with Cheese we heard about in “Pulp Fiction” – the title “The O.C.” is often tweaked or changed entirely when the show airs in international markets.

In Portugal, for example, the show’s title gets to the point — “Na Terra dos Ricos,” which is Portuguese for “In the Land of the Rich.” In Brazil, the show is “Um Estranho no Paraíso,” which translates to “An Outsider at Paradise.” And in Turkey – where the show is so popular that local TV creators made their own Turkish-language version and swapped out Newport Beach for Istanbul – the title is “Medcezir,” which means “tide.”

Cal State Fullerton’s Osborne-Thompson says American soaps, and action shows, often find wide audiences around the world.

“The show is a melodrama, and it’s prone to hyperbole. But it travels really well. All kinds of people want to watch it.”

And after they watch they might start referring to Orange County as “the O.C.”

“I heard somebody say ‘the O.C.’ on a plane,” said Newport Coast resident Balmer.

“I threw up a little, but I heard it.”

3. It played (the spirit of) OC music

Orange County, circa 2003, was a pop music hotbed.

No Doubt, from Anaheim, was big enough that year to be a halftime act in the Super Bowl, and the band’s singer, Gwen Stefani, was big enough to be on the cover of the first-ever Teen Vogue, a magazine that debuted in 2003. Sublime, Social Distortion, Lit, The Offspring, Thrice, Avenged Sevenfold, Reel Big Fish – lots of acts with strong local ties were on the radio or big live acts during that period.

Still, none of them made the cut for what would become a very early-aughts-era trendy soundtrack of “The O.C.”

Instead, Schwartz and others have said the vibrancy of Orange County’s real-life music scene inspired them to make sure innovative music was a focus for “The O.C.”

Still, even inadvertently, Orange County music did play in “The O.C.”

In one of the show’s pivotal moments – as Ryan’s would-be girlfriend (the doomed Melissa) drinks herself into oblivion at the end of the first season – viewers were treated to Jeff Buckley’s version of “Hallelujah,” a song written by Leonard Cohen. The late Buckley became a star in New York, but he was born in Anaheim and grew up in Orange County.

“Great song,” said fan Balmer. “Great moment.”

Melic, when prompted, said she remembered it, too.

“I’m not prone to tears, but I cried,” she wrote.

4. It told our story, sort of

You don’t have to squint to find a million things factually wrong with “The O.C.” It was less diverse than the real version of Orange County, a minority-majority county of 3.2 million; richer, dumber, more earnest.

But it wasn’t all wrong. The show captured a very specific mix of entitlement and family loyalty that felt familiar to anyone who grew up near a beach (and a few who didn’t) in Orange County.

“I got it,” Newport Coast resident Balmer said.

“I don’t remember a lot of people speaking Spanish on that show, or Vietnamese, or Korean, or Chinese. So I don’t think it really captured how not everybody here is White or rich or whatever.

“But when it comes to showing screwed-up people living screwed-up lives? They nailed it,” Balmer said, laughing.

The show, he added, generally “felt true-ish.”

And, true-ish or otherwise, “The O.C.” covered a lot of local ground in ways that still echo.

Do upper-middle-class/rich adults who live in cool houses near the Orange County coast have problems, big and small, like everybody else? Check. Do some of the teens living in those same houses look like models and live like entitled royalty, minus anything resembling a day job? Check again.

Is there a political divide? Weirdly, even though “The OC” is predicated on the premise that a lefty-leaning public defender (who, at the start of the show, is married to a conservative entrepreneurial heiress type) faces social hassles from time to time because of his politics and possibly his Jewish religion, the show might’ve actually underplayed that type of real friction.

Is there a series of other divides (financial, racial, beach access) between people in “The O.C.” and Inland Empire, the region from which the show’s protagonist, Ryan, departs in the premiere? Yes to all.

But, at its core, “The O.C.” was less about downer social issues than it was about characters dealing with stuff viewers might relate to.

Can people form bonds, despite living (literally, in their case) soap opera lives? The connection that Ryan forms with the show’s other protagonist (his O.C. adopted brother, Seth Cohen), and the Cohen family’s adopted mix of traditions (Chrismukkah!), and even the Season 3 tragedy we won’t reveal here, all suggest that the answer is yes.

“‘The O.C.’ was sort of a dream place,” Melic wrote.

“It was unreal. But fun, too.”

Source: Orange County Register