Love it or hate it, Family Guy displays an uncanny knack of boiling something down to its essence for the sake of a 30 second pop culture gag that have become the show’s staple. So when they condensed bland teen drama One Tree Hill, now in its seventh season as an anchor of the CW Network, into the following exchange: “I’ve got so many problems.” / “Hey, nothing that can’t be fixed by staring at a lake.” You can pretty much fill out the rest yourself. It’s the kind of show that you can break from to spend three months backpacking through Asia, and still manage to get caught up in half an hour upon your return. It’s about decent middle-class Americans in the sleepy town of Tree Hill North Carolina and their daily battle against the worst possible soap opera conventions.
The inevitable ticking time bomb with any high school drama is that people eventually do graduate, at which point your comfortable template format (not to mention your cheap, manageable, location shooting) goes out of the window. There are ways around it – the final season of Malcolm In The Middle engineered it so that Reese had to repeat his senior year – but the larger the cast the harder it becomes. Typically after high school the next stop is college (you’re naive if you think graduation will end the High School Musical juggernaut), but really, there is nothing quite so unbearable as “Generic High School Blather: The College Years".
Now this next part really is as cynical as it gets. As Ari Gold famously espoused on Entourage, “Produce a hundred episodes of even the most mediocre television and you can send your boy a Gulf Stream jet to cry on.” So there the producers were, four seasons and eighty-eight episodes towards that magic number of 100 episodes for $yndication and with it eternal paradi$e. How could they make sure they dodge the guillotine on that tricky return? So, a stroke of genius – let’s pretend four years have gone by! Even if it’s absolutely awful the novelty factor alone should drag them over the finish line. It did, and more. From the very beginning people were encouraged to get invested in the show and follow these characters for four grueling years because it was important, it mattered. The next four years? Fuck em! Who cares?
And so became season five, and from there, this complete season six. Season five ended on quite the cliffhanger; Lucas (Chad Michael Murray) had called one of the three gorgeous, willing women he had dangling to offer a marriage proposal. But, which one? The opening episode teases us with each possibility before finally revealing it to be Peyton (Hilarie Burton) and the two head off to Vegas to get hitched but decide to wait upon seeing the tackiness of the chapel. Meanwhile his father Dan (Paul Johansson), now at the top of the transplant list for a new heart, was mowed down in the street and lay unconscious at the vital moment his transplant beeper goes off. Quickly it becomes clear that Jamie’s unstable ex-nanny Carrie (Torrey DeVitto) was the one behind the wheel and a quite absurdly surreal (almost Lynchian really) revenge plot, with more than just a nod to Misery, begins to take shape.
Elsewhere on the home front, Nathan (James Lafferty) is fretting over his mother’s new internet boyfriend, not realizing that he is much closer to home than he thought. Brooke (Sophia Bush) is battling the evil and manipulative Victoria (Daphne Zuniga) over the Clothes Over Bros Company, which turns in Victoria's favor after the design sketches for Brooke’s new line are stolen in an apparent robbery.
So what can we learn from One Tree Hill apart from picking yourself up and dusting yourself down is the only way to go forward? Well, for one thing they managed to find a creative way to solve the dilemma of having people in their late twenties play teenagers. But really, the overriding lesson learned from One Tree Hill is that indeed there is nothing, truly nothing – not murder, infidelity, prison, or paralysis – that can’t be fixed by staring at a lake.
DVD Bonus Features
In addition to deleted scenes and a gag reel, this season six set contains commentary on two episodes by series creator Mark Schwahn and members of the cast and crew. There is a production design featurette on the roaring forties themed episode "We Three". Another featurette has guest music contributors discuss their spots. Also included is a director’s spotlight, highlighting some of the helmers debuting this season.
"One Tree Hill: the Complete Season Six" is on sale August 25, 2009 and is rated NR. Television. Written and directed by Various. Starring Antwon Tanner, Austin Nichols, Bethany Joy Galeotti, Chad Michael Murray, Hilarie Burton, Jackson Brundage, James Lafferty, Kate Voegele, Lee Norris, Lisa Goldstein, Sophia Bush.
