I’m watching the show and I’m not turned off by it. Suprising, really. And neither is the New Yorker:

“The O.C.” means to show us that, difficult as it may be for the misfit Ryan, a poor kid from a broken family, to make his way in this exclusive place, with its cutthroat attitude toward outsiders, life can be just as demanding, and even as frightening, for the insiders. (It’s not easy having green.) While on one level this is laughable—all you need to know about a gated community, it could be argued, is that there is a gate—“The O.C.â€? has a seductive quality.