The O.C.: The Complete Fourth Season: B+

In The O.C. nothing is what it seems. For the first season, that meant that creator Josh Schwartz’s soap-drama about a wealthy Newport Beach family who decides to adopt a street vagrant named Ryan Atwood (Benjamin McKenzie) was more intelligent and slyly entrancing than the generation of teen-oriented primtime shows - Beverly Hills, 90210 or Melrose Place - that had preceded it. It was entertaining, sincere, and witty where the viewer had only expected shallow mush. In the second season, this blossom of novelity turned fetid and mediocre; the arch over-lapping storylines (all of which inevitably found a main character the subject of some "salacious" or salacious lie or secret or misdeed) turned pulpy and madly over-imagined. Yet even that was lost for the third year: along with that faint glimmer of freshman glory went all semblance of a cohesive vision; the same set of second bananas that had trounced around, albeit glumly, Newport for season two were replaced by a veritable revolving door of tramps, schemers, businessman, and the like. But - surprise, surprise! - all that has changed. With Josh Schwartz back behind the wheel, The O.C.: The Complete Fourth Season has regained the largest share of its original sprightly bounce that is ever likely to occur.

When I say sprightly though, I don’t necesarily mean in a happy-go-lucky way. A huge plus for Schwartz and his team of writers is in a re-invigorated dramatic bent to the series. Its an easy thing to re-claim considering the last season ended with Marissa’s (Mischa Barton - she will not be missed) death in Ryan’s arms. Launching off from that comes "The Avengers," the season premiere, which finds each remaining member of the Cohen and Cooper families coping with life after the accident and high school. For some, the dislocation of long-distance relationships and dead-end summer jobs extending into the fall has stilted their personalities; others have taken the freedom as a re-ignition for a passion they never thought existed. And still others grapple with their grief by figuring out a way to actually grapple. Namely with Volchok (Cam Gigandet). For Seth (Adam Brody), Summer (Rachel Bilson), Ryan, and Julie (Melinda Clarke) respectively (among associated other parents and relatives), life seems a little different from where they had expected. But fear not! Come the next few episodes, the mad-antic highjinks of the gang will eventually re-ensnare them all...much to my delight.

Still, the dramatic subtleties don’t dissapear overnight, and seeing those first few episodes thrum with repression, betrayal, and depression - all embodied skillfully in the countenances of Clarke and McKenzie - gave off a satisfaction not felt since the first season finale. But eventually all good things come to an end, and this stands true even for The O.C. Except, the good persists. From "The Gringos" on towards "The Summer Bummer," the high-absurdist soap-factor skyrockets to levels of unimiginable glee. Thanks to the return of Taylor Townsend (Autumn Reeser, a geeky-comic vixen), Newport is again a place to party and have a good time. Bravo as well to the writing and the fellow cast. For the former, is there any greater proof of the resurgance of talent than witnessing "The Cold Turkey"’s dexterous balancing-act mixing tragedy and mania? For the latter, well, all I can say is watching the new Fab Four (that’s right: it’s Taylor-Ryan time) gives off a delirious, entertaining, charge.

So does most of The O.C. for its final season. Sure, there are a few flat spots ("The Metamorphosis") and just because a show can recognize that it has a tendency to wrap up plots in miliseconds doesn’t mean it gets a free pass on subsequent attempts to do so. But Josh Schwartz, who writes approximately a quarter of these sixteen episodes, keeps thing in fine form, never once lapsing too long into the dreck I’d become grudgingly accustomed to. What’s more, there are episodes that satisfy past the purely cerebral. The aforementioned season-openig arc are has a slow-burn pathos; and the penultimate "The Night Moves" isn’t just one of the most intricately suspenseful and riveting episodes of the whole series, but also writer Stephanie Savage’s best work. The surprise boils down to how, on not so infrequent occasions, the perfectly adequate fizz can give way to a deeper layer. Not only is the funny perfectly affected for this fourth season from the first, but so too is the underlying subtexts.

Of course, in the end, The O.C. is all about the soap. And there is plenty of crazy melodrama to sample (Chris Pratt, delightfully, as Che anyone?). Yet over ninety-two episodes and nearly five years, the audience has come to care about the Cohen family, and their affections are given due respect over the season. All the relationships that have been dragged out and showcased from Day One are finally resolved, with series finale "The End’s Not Near, It’s Here," and the flirty possibilities lately introduced aren’t entirely extinguished. For a writing-producing duo that would later move on to the far sillier Chuck and the far grittier, if less wholesome, Gossip Girl, to see them deliver on all the talent promised from those first twenty-seven episodes is, if not a dream come true, than a zany-fun experience that often leaves you laughing and touched, nary a Very Special Episode in sight. Say Welcome, or Goodbye, to The O.C. bitch.