Episodic Classics: The O.C., "The Telenovela,“ ”The Goodbye Girl” & ”The L.A.” | Season 1, Episodes 20, 21, & 22
The show gets more meta, as it’s officially too big to fail
I still maintain that the comedown from the Oliver arc is a strange one for The O.C.’s first season. The series was, arguably, at the peak of its powers, and it went even more full tilt into the meta aspect as a result. If this were any other show, I would call that a worrying, troublesome sign—see: Glee—but with The O.C., it kind of always felt right. The meta nature at this point of the first season has always felt like its true, final form, and with the large number of episodes and the massive amount of plot, I suppose it only made sense for it to reach this peak before it even got to a second. At the same time, this point in the season also brings us the Theresa arc, an arc that I’ve come to feel has stakes and driving forces that seem to change wildly from scene to scene, even in just the first two episodes of this batch alone. This post-Oliver, post-Ryan/Marissa break-up era also, unfortunately, brings us the sobering reality (which I would also consider a scathing indictment of…