As Orange County is so clearly Republican, I guess we'll get into that in a more substantive way at some point and we'll drop snide remarks here or there. But the Bush daughters say it's their favourite show, so we have to be careful.
As The O.C. started up again, I started to feel myself potentially getting pulled away.
By the time we air the first episode, the season will have already made 12 episodes. We'll be halfway through the season.
Certainly the experiences of Seth and his relationship to his parents and his point of view of the world are very similar to my own and very much based on my experiences at the University of Southern California.
Certainly there's got to be a little bit of reality show fatigue happening.
Fan reaction initially, while I hope they love the show, isn't going to be able to change any storylines in the immediate future.
Had I not been delivering on scripts and they'd been late or production had been behind, they wouldn't have cared if they thought I had my finger on the pulse of a generation or not. I think I would have been gone.
I am the kind of person that takes everything as is and then look at it from the outside looking in.
I don't think anybody benefits if The O.C. suffers and if the new show's not any good. So we rolled it back a little bi.
I had to pull back on a lot of the partying that takes place on the show because the network has asked us to work with them on that.
I have to get myself prepared for getting on the message boards and taking my lumps from fans, because no one is ever happy. If we're doing a storyline and people have a really violent reaction to it, that's illuminating to me.
I like to spread the gospel of The O.C.
I think maybe the network and the studio may trust me a little bit more in that I might be in more in touch with the youth culture. But I don't know that it's either been an advantage or a disadvantage in terms of how I'm perceived or how it is working with the studio network.
I think our show is very different from Orange County.
I think that the fact that we tell adult stories and younger stories helps the show appeal to a wider audience.
I think the scripted drama was dead until it wasn't, and now I think it's really exciting that a lot of really good shows are really interesting.
I think you're only as good as the work that you do.
I think, aside from being extremely attractive, the cast is really talented and can do humor and drama. I think the tone of the show surprised people.
I think, maybe from the early ads, people thought they were going to get a kind of melodrama. What we've done instead is something a little bit different, something that has a little bit more irony and a little bit more self-awareness and maybe is a little more successful because of that.
I want every character be an outsider in some way.
I'd started working when I was 21 and had been very determined about my career, very focused, even as a little kid, so it was something I had been working at for a long time.
If it happened to me, it can happen to anyone.
If you're Jewish, that becomes a part of who you are as a human being. You're disappointed that you didn't have better TV shows during the holidays, and not being able to decorate your tree or have a tree.
It is my goal to learn as much about the people I'm surrounded by. I am slowly widening who I am close with, and at the same time, growing further away from others.
It's more about Newport Beach than it is about Orange County. We don't look at it with disdain. We don't act as if our characters are above it.
It's my experience that the fluidity of sexuality with younger people is more accepted.
It's never been done... to launch a new show after the first year of another show.
It's really hard in this day and age, with radio and MTV being so consolidated, to get new music out there. I think we've become a really legitimate, viable avenue for getting new music out there.
Last year, at the beginning of the year, we couldn't get arrested, so I'll take this. Feast versus famine.
Like they said about The West Wing, you can't do a show about Washington until you can.
Linda Lavin will definitely be back. I'm happy to say that the chemistry is working.
Marissa is at a point in her life where she's trying to find herself and her true identity. There's another character who she really connects with. It's a girl, but she's willing and game to explore and experiment with that.
Now the character of Seth has become so much of Adam Brody. I've passed the baton to him.
Obviously, this is a cyclical industry where things are in and then people burn out on them. Right now we might be witnessing a little bit of that with maybe the procedural drama.
Parents' lives can be just as screwed up as the kids'. Part of being a kid for me was my interaction with my parents.
Peter Gallagher plays the singing Jew on the show.
Ten-year plan? No, three-year plan! I'm in a hurry.
The best years are behind me.
The characters are that vague TV high school age, but they'll be in high school as long as we need them to be.
The first project I ever sold was called Providence and was about a kid approaching his senior year with all this angst and anxiety.
The girls in high school who watched 90210? I was watching Seinfeld.
The idea initially was that kids would casually have sex or not have sex, do drugs or not do drugs, and wouldn't draw conclusions about who they were as people.
The press always ends up being much nicer than I expect. A lot of times they say something snarky about you, but then you meet them in person and they couldn't be nicer.
The support that we have from the network in terms of watching us at an unusual time in the year and playing our episodes three times in a given week until we built an audience... is exceptional.
The tone is fun and light, and even when it's dramatic, we never take ourselves too seriously, which I think audiences appreciate. When we do take ourselves seriously, we'll come back in the next episode and lighten it up a little bit.
The trap is that you then just start doing stuff about Hollywood, which I don't really want to do.
There is always drama and there will always be drama, but its the way its presented in my head that makes it so interesting. Everyone gets their time in the middle of the drama.
There's enough people claiming there's a homosexual subtext between Seth and Ryan, so why make it the text?
There's got to be a little bit of reality show fatigue happening.
This season we have lots of bands on like The Killers, The Walkmen, Modest Mouse and The Thrills.
We could give the network what they were looking for in terms of the trappings of a glossy soap, but we hoped that characters would be a little bit more textured and a bit funnier than are usually seen in this kind of show.
We don't have any plans for any big stunt casting at this point. We do have four new characters who are coming on to the show, and they're all great.
We don't hold anything back. We go for broke, and if we have a good idea for a story line, we just use it because you never know and because the dynamics of the show are going to change.
We just happened to come along at time where there hadn't been a new young adult drama that also could appeal to adults as well in quite some time. We sort of found a little bit of a niche.
We never wanted to be one of those shows that you might find on another network that tend to set up their triangles and then take that central dynamic and... recycle our storylines.
We've tried to evolve the show. There's less spectacle than there was last year. Last year we really had something to prove and we wanted to make a big splash and get seen. Now that's happened. This year we wanted to slow down the storytelling a little bit; dig in with our characters.
When George Lucas did a cameo on the show, I picked him and his daughter up at the airport. I gave them a tour of the set.
Year Two is a critical year for any television show.
You gotta strike while the iron's hot.
You have to act like a responsible professional in the industry regardless of your age.
You've seen the Laguna Beach reality show. That's what these girls look like, and the guys, too. It's just a culture of being outside and surfing and volleyball, which is on the beach. It's just this whole outdoor culture under the sun.
When The OC was in production, Josh would often have bands giving him their CD's so their music could be featured on the show.
When he was attending college, he watched Seinfeld, South Park and The Daily Show among other things.
When The OC was still airing, Josh planned to do an entire episode of The OC that was actually an episode of The Valley, The OC's fictional parody.
Josh worked on Alphabet City and Athens, two dramas that was set to air on Fox, but neither were produced.
He was a part of the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity in college.
Since his childhood, Josh always knew he wanted to write.
Josh is Jewish.
Josh has a younger brother and a younger sister.
Josh earned $1 million from the TV movie "Brookfield".
Josh was nominated for a 2004 Writers Guild of America Award.
Josh is an active member in both the Writers and Producers Guilds.
In The OC, Josh has put some of his high school teachers in the show. Including a science teacher and dean from the Wheeler School.
Josh's parents were both toy designers for Hasbro Toys in Rhode Island.
Josh's Chinese zodiac sign is the Dragon.
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