One Tree Hill - the show that won't die

I come before you today, not to praise One Tree Hill, but to (in all liklihood) bury it. Next Monday, the CW will air the finale of the seventh season and as of yet there's been no official word about if the show will be back the following year. Given the show began the season having lost two of its four most principle characters, and with them the core relationships that launched the show, common sense would dictate that this is the end.

Or is it?

When nuclear war breaks out, I'm pretty sure the only things that will survive are cockroaches and One Tree Hill. For those not in the know, One Tree Hill is a teen drama that began airing on the WB in the fall of 2003, and then moved to the then-new CW network in the fall of 2006. Created by Mark Schwahn, the show didn't start off bad. The show was built around two half-brothers fathered by the same man, Dan Scott. Lucas (Chad Michael Murray) was the son who Dan fathered with his high school sweetheart before going off to college, dumping her, and getting his new affluent girlfriend pregnant with Nathan (James Lafferty.)

Now teenagers in the same small town high school, Lucas and Nathan might as well live in different worlds. Nathan was raised in a world of privilege, as his parents married and his mother came from money. Lucas had to make due with a single mom who struggled to make ends meet. In the pilot episode, Lucas is encouraged to try out for the school's basketball team, a move that puts him in direct conflict with his brother - already a star player in his junior year. A love triangle is evident from the first episode, as Lucas is clearly in love with Nathan's girlfriend.

As I've said before, I'm big on character-driven shows. Add that to the fact that OTH was essentially a replacement for Dawson's Creek and I decided to give it a few episodes. I have to admit that after a rough first few episodes, the show seemed to overcome its growing pains and turn into an interesting drama. Unlike Dawson's, the adult characters were well-rounded and had stories almost as compelling as their young counterparts, and despite the fact the two male leads couldn't act to save their lives, the supporting cast - particularly overachiever Haley (Bethany Joy Galeotti) and cheerleader Brooke (Sophia Bush) - were fun to watch and easy on the eyes.

If you want to see the difference a show-runner can make to a series, watch the first season and compare it to what followed. During the first season, creator Mark Schwahn was deemed too inexperienced to run the show so the network hired Mark B. Perry, a veteran of The Wonder Years and Party of Five, to shepherd the series. The writing staff he assembled included some strong writers like Mike Kelley, later of Jericho and Swingtown. Schwahn's influence grew with the second season and Perry eventually left - setting One Tree Hill on a course to being one of the most enjoyably trashy "bad" TV shows on the air.


These are just a few of the more memorable examples of the show's writing: multiple car crashes every season, instant careers in music and fashion, teen marriage, obnoxious tertiary characters who arrive and then never leave long after their stories end, a hooker hired to make Dan's brother fall in love with her so that Dan could crush said brother by making her leave him at the altar, long-lost birth mom finding her daughter only to soon die of cancer, "Who tried to kill Dan Scott?," school shootings, fratricide (committed by Mayor Dan Scott... yeah, he ran for mayor at one point), point-shaving and high school gambling, teen pregnancy, psycho web-cam stalkers, child porn sex tapes, "clean teens," psycho nannies, kidnapping, more murder, attempted suicide, and a plot that had Lucas adapt his novel into a film that was directed by a skeevy director played with relish by Dawson himself, James Van Der Beek.

This show is TV crack.

On one hand, I'm tempted to salute executive producer Mark Schwahn. Any talent deficit he has, he surely makes up for in passion for his show and its survival. Most show-runners tend to become more hands-off in later years, turning their attention to other projects as they get bored with their creations. New showrunners who follow in their footsteps often have trouble maintaining quality.

I'll give Schwahn credit for staying loyal to his show and then going to the mat for it at every opportunity. The series has always been an underdog. I recall the Hollywood Reporter story when the series hit 100 episodes, which pointed out that it barely got on the air. OTH was set as a mid-season replacement, only to get promoted at the last moment when another anticipated show proved to be unmanageable. The first two seasons the show earned a renewal by the skin of its teeth. Then, in season three it looked like a goner for sure. UPN and the WB were merging the following fall and it soon became clear that there were only a few open slots and that if One Tree Hill stayed, it would likely be at the expense of critical darling Everwood.

So Schwahn "bet on his show," ignored network requests not to end on a cliffhanger and closed the season with several characters in peril. The fans rallied and got their fourth season. Amazingly he mobilized them the following year as well, and the CW ordered 13 episodes for season five as a midseason replacement, fully expecting that to be the end. And it might have been, had it not been for the writer's strike that allowed OTH to relaunch with little competition on any other networks. They were so far ahead that once the strike ended, additional episodes the CW ordered were able to be produced and aired without missing a beat. Ratings justified a sixth season, and then somehow, a seventh.

Schwahn claims he gets little respect from the network despite all the money he's made for them. In another context, I might find it in myself to salute his dedication. He found money to keep the show going by taking product placement to a new level. The show might as well be named "Synergy" for all the external tie-ins and sponsors it's shilled for. The short-list includes not only the typical soundtracks, but also tours and "benefit albums" that were actually incorporated into show storylines. Then there have been in-your-face product placements by Sunkist and Maxim, which was part of an entire storyline when one girl posed for their "Hometown Hotties" feature (which was naturally also cross-promoted in the magazine itself.)

Take a good look because this is what all TV is going to look like as costs continue to rise. You've never seen product integration until you've seen it the One Tree Hill way.


Also, the show's debut coincided with my discovery of the wonderful site Television With Pity. I probably should blame/credit TWOP with my continued viewing, as there's this morbid fascination with just how low the series could go. (I don't visit gossip sites, but TWOP regularly passed on tidbits from the set that suggest that if E! ever does a True Hollywood Story about this series, it will be a must-see.) Thus it came as no surprise to me or anyone else on TWOP when Schwahn eventually wrote himself into the show. As one reader had predicted quite a while prior to that, he played a mentor to Peyton's character, the owner of a record store she frequented.

So Mark, since I'm sure you're the kind of guy who Googles himself I just want to say "Thanks for seven years of jaw-dropping, eye-rolling, what-the-hell-are-the-writers-smoking, so terrible that it laps 'bad' and cycles back to 'Brilliantly awesomely awful,' how-the-hell-are-tweens-watching-this-show-unironcally, writing." I know you can't take all the credit; The Chad certainly did his part to make this the TV equivalent of The Room. For now, thanks for the laughs.

But if you come back at the expense of the consistently improving Life Unexpected, I swear I'll use my upcoming "Lessons from TV Episodes" series to explain why your "brilliant" school shooting episode is one of the most offensive episodes in television history.