Friday, November 05, 2004

BACK TO THE OC

Pretty good season 2 pilot. Of course they had to get Seth and Ryan back to the OC, and it's nice that they spent the entire first ep of Season 2 doing it. Soaps tend to eat up plot, so you're well advised to make a meal of any plot turns that come up naturally.

Interesting how the plot was all about how Seth's departure, not Ryan's, seems to have messed everyone up. Apparently the audience is terribly fond of geeky, articulate, slightly depressive Seth, and he's becoming more the central character, when well-meaning, cool, not very talkative Ryan was the star of Season One.

I have no idea offhand (I haven't put a lot of thought to it) how you'd spec an OC, given how soapy the story line is. It might not be a good idea to spec this show -- everyone's seen some episodes but far fewer of them will be up on the chronology of the season, so your clever counterpoint to it may go unnoticed. If I had to spec it, my first impulse would probably be to introduce some temporary new characters -- a girl out of Seth's past shows up. But it might be stronger to have the characters pass a night that, later, they wouldn't want to talk about -- so it fits in the chronology but doesn't affect the chronology. The kind of episode that deepens the relationships without altering their essential nature.

Anyway, I'm gonna be watching this show. And thank the Goddess for something to watch.

Labels: pilot, spec pilots

8:17 AM

1 Comments:

I agree that it would be difficult to spec the show because of the soapiness, but there must be some way to do it. You mentioned in an earlier post that Desperate Housewives was worth speccing and it's just as soapy, though having twice the audience of the OC might assure that a few more are "up on the chronology of the season" there.

Seth has definitely become more of the lead. I read somewhere that creator Josh Schwartz planned to take the focus off of Ryan because we'd now been introduced to the OC world through his eyes and seeing everything from his POV was no longer as necessary now that he's not new to the environment. I'm just glad they didn't decide to make Marissa the central character, as she irritates me in ways that words cannot describe.

-- Adam

By  Anonymous, at 11:16 AM  

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