The OC & Me

In Brazil, I felt homesick for the first time. The sensation came to me most often at night, when, after a day spent researching for a book about the grandfather who had deserted my family, I came home to my apartment, a small studio on the eleventh floor, above a seedy strip club rumored to be a brothel. I stood in the cramped kitchen, bathed in fluorescent light, staring at the cold bathroom tile that covered the entire unit. I stirred one of the three pasta sauces I knew how to make. I felt completely, hopelessly alone.

Perhaps I should have expected homesickness. After all, I had just begun a year-long research fellowship in a foreign city, six thousand miles from friends and family in California. My homesickness bewildered me, though, because it elicited a strange internal response. In Rio, I found myself drawn to the loud, boorish Americans I tried to avoid back home—the type that wore American-flag swimsuits and chanted “USA!” at every available opportunity. I also spent hours on Gchat, exchanging emoji-filled correspondence with friends and acquaintances I barely knew. Strangest of all, I became obsessed with Fox’s mid-2000s teen drama television series, The OC.

I don’t remember why exactly I began watching The OC. The show wasn’t critically acclaimed, and in 2015, most of its cult following had faded away. The OC wasn’t easy to watch, either. Because the show was unavailable on any of the ubiquitous streaming platforms, I exposed my computer to viruses from illicit sites that hemorrhaged pop-up windows each time I clicked “play.”

If I had told my friends I liked The OC, I suspect they might have accused me of watching it ironically. The show, which follows four emotionally distraught teenagers in California’s opulent Orange County, is corny, full of lame jokes, far from cool. Nearly every episode begins with a banal premise: a cotillion at the country club, a new employee at the crab shack, a dispute in the family real estate company. No matter how cliché the conceit, however, each episode culminates in high drama: a sucker punch from a debutant dad, a gun shot at a beach party, a model home gone up in flames. Why was I, a twenty-five-year-old who thought of himself as a serious writer, drawn to this teen melodrama?

I wish I could say my enjoyment of the show was ironic. Instead it consumed me. I turned down dinner parties and samba shows to huddle up in bed and watch. I came to consider an episode of The OC as a kind of nightcap, an appropriate treat after a day...