Today, the Sunday Magazine – a glossy supplement bundled with the Sunday Star-Times – mustered up enough nerve to include The O.C. in the bottom end of its "Up/Down" column: another hare-brained variation on the "What's Hot/What's Not" style barometer. Describing the TV2 show as "vacuous" and for "teens" (well, duh), it's the kind of throwaway footnote that I normally flat-out ignore. Only this time, I felt reluctantly as if I should agree.

An undisputed guilty pleasure of the TGIF, season two – after ten or so episodes – is stuttering plainly on the failure to make that ugly transition from plucky freshman to sophomore cool. In particular, it just itches with a rash of unwanted adolescent growth spurts: Seth, Ryan and co. sure look like they're too-cool-for-school, but the incessant drive of the show's writers to make these kids mature way-to-quickly into a brat-pack of independent society faux-outsiders is repeatedly knocked back by the call of homework and science projects. Marissa, for example, is no longer an off-the-rack mannequin decked out in pink Lacoste and iPod white, but a Jean Seberg free-spirit who now listens to Interpol and wears a pin-stripped blazer littered with indie rock badges. And yet, the problem is she still doesn't know who Kofi Annan is (some guy who works for United Airlines, her gal-pal Summer thinks). Boppers love The O.C. precisely because they're impressionable and will latch on to anything that CosmoGirl endorses (the crap self-referential joke in the show being that Marissa is so beautiful she could appear on the cover of any fashion magazine – which in real life, she quantifiably has), but for the 18+ viewer, the appeal of rich kids behaving badly (and the parents who don't so much as keep them in line, but rock the boat themselves) has quickly eroded in the face of once-self-mocking SoCal teenagers who've become too hipster-fraudulent for their own good.—Tim Wong

» Josh Schwartz | USA | 2003-2005+