There’s a quote in the show One Tree Hill:
Tree Hill is a place somewhere in the world. Maybe it’s a lot like your world, maybe it’s nothing like it. But if you look closer, you might see someone like you.
The full quote, from a Lucas Scott voiceover, is much longer, but that is the part that stood out to me. Tree Hill is a fictitious town on a television show, filmed in Wilmington, North Carolina. But, the characters resonate with the audience watching in many different ways. And, if the audience is like me, it resonates differently at the different stages of life we are experiencing when it is re-watched.
When I first watched One Tree Hill, when it premiered, I was in middle school. When the series finale aired, I was about to finish my sophomore year of college. I grew up with the show, but not really. After the characters graduated high school, the show does a time jump to their world after the four years of college. So, when I was in high school and college, the characters I had grown to love were at very different stages of their fictitious lives. By the time it went off air, One Tree Hill had taught me some lessons, but what I didn’t realize were the lessons it would teach me in the eight years since it went off the air.
In those years, I graduated college, took a job in a city far from home, moved home, moved away again for law school, graduated law school, and passed the bar exam. But, that’s not all. I lost both maternal grandparents, lost contact with my cousin, and I fell out of touch with friends. The dog I got right before I turned nine died at 15, shortly after my grandfather passed, and the dog I got in seventh grade died while I was away at law school at 13.
Now, if you’ve hung with me this long, you are probably wondering, how does any of this relate to One Tree Hill? Well, it’s the little things, its all of the characters, their struggles, their triumphs. It’s the fact that at different parts of my life, I found a familiarity and comfort in the varying struggles and triumphs of those characters.
The first time One Tree Hill became more than a television show I simply just loved, was when my grandfather passed away. I was absolutely devastated. I lost my Pa but my mom lost her dad, and it was really hard for her. I couldn’t understand what she was going through. I don’t remember if I was watching One Tree Hill at the time or had recently completed a re-watch or simply just remembered the show from another time I had watched it. But what I do remember was remembering how Haley struggled after her mom passed away in the show, and it helped me to understand my mom. It helped me to understand how deeply she was hurting. Of course, that’s not what I got out of that storyline the first time I watched the show, but I hadn’t experienced a loss like that when those episodes aired in 2010.
Until recently, that was the only part of the show that really resonated with me personally. Well, besides the way that Brooke Davis guarded her heart and was afraid to show how genuinely kindhearted she truly was. Before now, I had re-watched the show a bunch of times but I think I was still the kid who thought she knew it all, or whatever, and didn’t really think much more on the characters and the themes that transcend time. The characters and themes that are just as relevant today as they were then. Yes, music tastes might have changed, and if it was on now, the OTH soundtrack might sound a bit different, but that’s not the point.
Maybe because I chose to re-watch One Tree Hill during quarantine, after I had already done some self-reflecting, the messages and the themes resonated with me differently this time. More specifically, the post-high school, post-college lives of the characters.
For example, I remember when the episode aired when Bevin worked at Macy’s and she hadn’t really seen anyone since high school. I remember, back then, thinking, “no way, there’s no way I will be working retail after college.” Boy was I wrong at how realistic that was. Hell, I found myself working retail after college... and after law school! But then, five-ish years later, Bevin shows up again. She no longer works retail and clearly has built a career in her position at the court house. Now, I see that storyline, albeit a fringe storyline of the high school cheerleader who played dumb for the sake of others, but wasn’t stupid, who like a normal person, struggled a bit before finding her way. Now, watching that story unfold, with the day-to-day untold, makes a hell of a lot more sense than it did to me before.
And there’s Mouth. Marvin McFadden, like Nathan Scott, had a dream. He wanted to be a sportscaster. He found some success early on after college but he didn’t want to compromise his personal life or his values in order to succeed or to continue in his positions. After refusing to report a gossip story about his friend and pro-basketball player, Nathan Scott, Mouth was fired and he wound up working as a bar back/bartender for a little while. The character and integrity of Marvin “Mouth” McFadden is easy to write in a script, but much harder to emulate in the real world.
Another storyline that didn't make sense to me when it first aired was that in the final season, they wrote Mouth’s character to gain a lot of weight. That for sure did not make any sense to me until recently. Mouth’s character gained weight because he was struggling. He struggled with the fact he took previous opportunities for granted and was nowhere near close to his dream job of being a sportscaster. Yes, he had a good life, good friends, a good relationship, and a good job. But just because on paper something seems good or perfect or like someone should be happy, it doesn’t mean that they are or that they don’t have their own issues that they are dealing with. I get this now. I get that it isn’t just a “haha! Mouth got fat” storyline. I get it now, because I’ve been there. I am there. I realized it and made the conscious choice to get healthy again. I think this storyline is important. For most it might become overshadowed by the overarching story of Nathan being kidnapped, but it is important nonetheless. It is important because anyone can be Mouth. Yes, he gains weight. A lot of people watching will laugh, because they themselves have never experienced something like it. But despite those few who will make fun of "Fat Mouth", like the people who make fun of "Fat Thor", the character of Marvin McFadden is someone an overwhelming amount of people can relate to, much more than they can Nathan or Lucas Scott. Mouth was the nerd, the nice guy, the always friend in high school. He had a passion he pursued. He faced a lot of the same setbacks that the regular people watching the show have faced along the way, and he overcame them. To me, Mouth is one of the most important characters in the entire show.
But I think what really hit closest to home this time around was Peyton and Lucas moving away and how the characters who stayed home in Tree Hill dealt with their best friends, their family, moving. Now I am fully aware of the reasons that Hilarie Burton Morgan left the show and I do not want this post to diminish those reasons. Again, these are my feelings on the character storylines after Lucas and Peyton were gone and how those feelings and understanding of the evolution of friendships have changed immensely from the first time watching OTH to now. When the show was still running, I was kind of annoyed that there was no more Lucas and Peyton. Maybe I was too young at the time to fully understand why the actors left the show or I was just pissed off that the forever will they/won’t they couple FINALLY was together and then we, the audience, didn’t get to enjoy the family unit of Lucas Scott, Peyton Sawyer Scott, and Sawyer Brooke Scott. What I also did not understand at the time was how people who were once so close to them (Brooke Davis, Haley James Scott, Nathan Scott, Mouth, etc.) could just drift apart after they moved away. I remember thinking "cellphones have texting now and hey they can always call them". Now, I know it would be interesting writing to have the one-sided phone calls and logistically, for production purposes, I get why they didn't and later, creatively, they chose for Haley to write letters to Lucas. But I never understood how they, best friends, family, could just drift apart. Yea, they were all still friends, still family, who cared about each other, but it wasn’t the same as it was. I never understood that. Now, I for sure do.
When you live close to people you are friends with, it’s easy to keep in touch, to stay in the loop, to make plans. When you, or they, move away, something changes. It’s not an intentional change but overtime, the longer time spent apart, there is a change in the friendship. I’m not saying this is wrong, or bad, it just is. Yes, you are still friends. You text some, and call occasionally, but as time passes, you each settle into your lives, and the texting and calling becomes more infrequent. Yes, you still let them know the big things, but it’s never the same as it once was. Now, with social media and meme culture, it’s easy to just tag someone in a meme of whatever it is you think they will find funny, or one that reminds you of them. But that’s not actual dialogue. It’s not actual conversation. Eventually even that stops.
You then find yourself questioning yourself, wondering. What happened to the friendship? Did they ever really care? Did I ever really care? Why is it so easy to lose touch with the people I was once so close with? Do I actually miss this person? Do they miss me? Do I miss the idea of them? Is it ok to no longer call them my best friend? Is it ok that a new person in my life, or even someone who has been there all along, is now my best friend? These are questions I have struggled with myself and re-watching One Tree Hill (again) has helped me to start making sense of it all.
It’s okay to hold on to what was special in a friendship. It’s okay to move away, or to move home, and add some really awesome people to your life. It’s okay to still be friends with someone even if the friendship isn’t as close as it once was. It’s okay to have friends you see as family and for that relationship to change. It’s okay to have friends who are just friends. It’s okay to have friends in different friend groups. It’s also okay to not be close to anyone you went to high school with. It's okay to still be close with your childhood and high school friends. It’s okay to consider someone who entered your life as an adult, after high school, after college, to be your best friend.
As you grow up, you change. Or you don’t actually change at all and you just become less afraid to show who you really are. Both are okay. In that change, in that maturation, it’s okay to re-evaluate friendships, relationships, acquaintanceships, and to allow yourself to embrace the realizations you find within yourself. Sometimes, those realizations can cause friendships to fail, or it can be the reason they they flourish.
So yes, this time around, I looked closer. I found someone like me in Tree Hill. But it wasn’t just one someone; it was little parts of a lot of someone’s. It was lines of dialogue, some simple, some immensely powerful. It was a voiceover. A story. It was re-watching a teen drama throughout different stages of my life that has helped me to make sense of the world around me. It's no different than re-reading a book that was once assigned to you in middle school, then again in high school, and then of your own volition reading it again once there was no academic reason to do so. You pick up on different things each time. You find someone or something you identify with. Someone’s art matters to you.
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