Starring: Chad Michael Murray, James Lafferty, Hilarie Burton, Bethany Joy Galeotti, Sophia Bush, Lee Norris, Antwon Tanner, Jackson Brundage, Lisa Goldstein, Austin Nichols, Kate Voegele
Created By: Mark Schwahn
Network: The CW
Original Air Date: 09/01/2008 – 05/18/2009

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.

Now 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.

Click here to read the full review at JustPressPlay.net.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 30th, 2009 at 11:34 pm and is filed under American Television, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.