School’s back in session on Fox tonight, and there’s murder and mayhem aplenty.
“The O.C.” returns and is joined by “Reunion,” a new device-heavy drama that Fox hopes will keep people drawn in weekly on Thursday nights.
Early in the third-season premiere of “The O.C.” – which you can see at 8 tonight on KCPQ, Channel 13 – Summer Roberts is sitting poolside with her best friend, Marissa Cooper, when she gets all philosophical.
“You know, freshman year, Coop, if you would’ve asked me what we would’ve been doing the weekend before senior year,” Summer says, “I probably would’ve said a road trip to Rosarito, or rush week at SC meeting college boys …”
Marissa interrupts, “And waiting to get charged with manslaughter?”
Welcome to senior year on “The O.C.”
The new season picks up two months after the last one ended.
Ryan’s brother, Trey, is clinging to life in a coma after Marissa shot him while he was trying to choke Ryan to death. Ryan was defending his girlfriend, Marissa, because his brother, Trey, tried to rape her.
The adults are all in shambles, too. Everyone’s still reeling over patriarch Caleb’s death. His adult daughter Kirsten is still in rehab and his trophy wife, Julie, is trying to get her hands on Caleb’s cash.
Julie and Jimmy are also trying to protect Marissa from the judicially adverse effects of shooting someone.
It’s all in a night’s watching for this show, which is looking to get back the edge that made it so buzzworthy in its first year.
If you’ve only heard about it and feel overwhelmed by all this, don’t be. It’s all pretty basic, once you get the family trees figured out:
Caleb Nichols was married to Julie Cooper, who is Marissa’s mom and the ex-wife of Jimmy Cooper, who lives on a boat and pops up every now and then.
Caleb was also the father of Kirsten Cohen, who is married to Sandy Cohen. Their son is Seth Cohen.
The wild card is Ryan Atwood, a tough kid with a good heart from Chino who the Cohens adopted at the very start of all these shenanigans three years ago.
Together they weave their way through the crazy world of Newport, Calif.
Creator and executive producer Josh Schwartz spilled a few beans during a teleconference last week.
A story line involving Ryan’s baby with Theresa, an old girlfriend from Chino, “will resolve itself some time in the near future,” Schwartz promised.
“A major character will leave, and we may find ourselves at another funeral this year, as well,” Schwartz said.
And with Caleb now out of the picture, Schwartz said that “Julie and Jimmy are going to make another run at it, but you know that Jimmy Cooper …”
Time travel with ‘Reunion’
There’s no DeLorean, just a different sort of writing device that’s whisking us back to 1986 tonight, then returning us to 2005 on “Reunion.”
It premieres at 9 tonight on KCPQ, Channel 13.
It’s an unusual device that takes us from a present-day funeral and murder investigation back in time to 1986. Next week, we’ll see what happened in 1987, then 1988 the week after that and so on.
The catch is that we don’t know who’s dead – but the writers say we’ll find that out in a few weeks – and we don’t know who killed “the deceased.” That’s the way “the deceased” is identified in the early episodes to avoid divulging even the gender of “the deceased.”
The idea is a little more clever than the writing and acting – which is OK, with the exception of Sean Faris, who plays Craig and is downright distracting to watch.
But it’s enough to make me want to pop in now and then to see what develops.
Victor Balta’s column runs Mondays and Thursdays on the A&E page. Reach him at 425-339-3455 or vbalta@heraldnet.com.
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