Podbit · The Bill Simmons Podcast
Bill Simmons' daughter Zoe watched The OC for the first time at 18 and immediately preferred it to every current teen drama. Her diagnosis: modern TV tries too hard, shoves in too many characters and plotlines, and forgets to make you actually care about anyone.
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At 1:08:00 · chapter starts 1:04:07
The episode's warmest segment is also its sharpest piece of TV criticism. Zoe Simmons, born a year and a half after The OC premiered, watched Season 1 as the family rewatched for a Prestige TV podcast project and immediately loved it [1] — Zoe Simmons "Bill Simmons' daughter Zoe watched The OC for the first time at 18 and immediately preferred it to every current teen drama. Her diagnosis:…" 1:08:00 . Her diagnostic on why: modern TV tries too hard. It shoves in too many plot lines, too many types of characters, too many elements because executives don't trust audiences to stay engaged with a simple, well-executed premise. The OC had a simple premise — outsider boy moves into rich neighborhood, falls for girl next door — and it trusted that premise completely [2] — Zoe Simmons "TV back then, it was so organic. It's like everything was so true to life and it was easy and no one was trying too hard. In all these show…" 1:21:10 . Zoe's character rankings are definitive: Seth is everyone's favorite, Summer had the best arc from villain to scene-stealer, Ryan and Marissa are both terrible actors though Marissa's obliviousness is the show's most reliable source of anger. They discuss the Oliver plotline (infuriating but effective), the pregnancy arc (a creative mistake but one that produced the Jeff Buckley finale montage), Adam Brody's squandered post-OC film career due to the season's 27-episode schedule, and the pre-smartphone world the show captures that Zoe finds genuinely wistful — a time before plans were over-organized and social life had mystery. The conversation closes on Zoe's current TV landscape: Euphoria (which she distinguishes as a different category), Stranger Things (stalled by the writers' strike), and a landscape that leaves her hungry for exactly the kind of show she's been binge-watching from 2003.
Adam Brody and Rachel Bilson, who played Seth and Summer, were dating in real life during production — and it shows. Zoe Simmons argues that modern TV's lack of genuine character chemistry is one of its biggest failures, and The OC's secret weapon was something you simply can't manufacture.
The OC's first season had 27 episodes. By the time Adam Brody became a phenomenon as Seth Cohen, he was already locked into Season 2 with no window to leverage his fame in film. A TV calendar mismatch, not a talent gap, cost him his shot at movie stardom.
The OC's first season ran 27 episodes, each roughly an hour long, far more than modern prestige TV seasons.
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