My First Look: One Tree Hill

Image Source: vidiot.com

My First Look is a new blog series that takes you into the pilot episodes of long-established shows that we missed the first time around.

Watching a show for the first time after it has existed in the public consciousness for over a decade can be a pretty daunting thing. I was always dimly aware of One Tree Hill, or more accurately I was dimly aware of Chad Michael Murray’s cheekbones. I never knew anything concrete about the show except that whenever I passed the CW while channel surfing the characters on this particular show were always making faces like this:

Image Source: www.photofurl.com

So for the inaugural edition of My First Look, I chose to watch the pilot episode of One Tree Hill and try to decipher what all the smoldering and cheekbones were about. And here are my conclusions:

It is about smoldering and cheekbones. There are two brothers, one the high school basketball star who is brunette, a jerk and has a hot girlfriend. The other one is tortured, blond, reads Steinbeck and Shakespeare and desires said hot girlfriend. The entire thing is fairly dripping with 90′s zeitgeist, to the point where in the first fifteen minutes there is almost a three-way car crash between a bus of drunken teenagers, a girl searching for CD’s in her backseat, and a train. Not to mention the entire scene is scored to the delicate strains of Dashboard Confessional. Ahh.

In all, the entire show reads along the lines of the O.C. lite: beautiful people doing young and rebellious things. But the O.C. had something One Tree Hill seems to be lacking: a sense of humor. This is a crucial aspect because there’s only so much soap opera a human being can take within the course of a week. The O.C. was always able to lighten Benjamin Mackenzie’s brooding with a few scenes of Adam Brody’s Seth. No such luck here.

Image Source: oth-caps.tumblr.com

But if you’re in the mood to look at attractive people dealing with the tragedies of their lives, this is a great place to start. It’s got everything: dubious parentage, daddy issues, mommy issues, brother issues, as well as free-throws. The screenwriters grab for emotional gut-wrenching with all the subtlety of a Russian assault helicopter. The girl, at least, has a little more going for her than Mischa Barton’s Marissa on the O.C., who was meant to be sympathetic simply because she was pretty and troubled. This one, aside from dating the jerk brother for no apparent reason (don’t they always), has a vinyl player! Hipster cred!

Will I keep watching? Hard to say. There is a side of me, deep down, that secretly loves soap-y entertainment, especially on rainy days. And hey, I live in Portland. I might watch until Nice Brother gets the girl, but for all I know that could be in the middle of season five. And it’s tough to judge a series just by one episode–the series has been going for nine seasons. Odds are it has something going for it, even if that something is smoldering and cheekbones.