In one of the most grimly hilarious admissions we’ve ever seen crop up in an oral history of a once-beloved TV drama, the writers of The O.C. have now admitted that they made Adam Brody’s character Seth Cohen a stoner in the show’s later seasons in order to cover up for how phenomenally bored Brody had become of starring in The O.C.. “At least if we can write that he’s stoned, then we’re not trying to write around it,” series creator Josh Schwartz says in a new book about the show, quoted in TooFab this week. “That’s where ‘Kaitlin gets Seth hooked on pot’ took root.”
Da'Vine Joy Randolph had to learn to smoke for "The Holdovers"
Said admission comes courtesy of Alan Sepinwall’s new Welcome To The O.C.: An Oral History, which tracks the rise, and then what Adam Brody would now probably politely refer to as the decline, of the Fox hit. He was, by his own admission, a little more blunt about his lack of enthusiasm for the series past its first season at the time, saying in the history that “I think I very much let my distaste for the later episodes be known. I didn’t mask that at all, and I’m sure I openly mocked it a bit. So I’m not proud of that.” (Brody does state that “I was polite to everyone. I liked the directors, and the crew and I got on really well and I didn’t keep people waiting”… but also cops to refusing to read scripts for any scenes he wasn’t personally in, calling the behavior unprofessional.)
All of which, apparently, led Schwartz and his fellow writers to decide to address the fact that their lead was acting like he didn’t want to be caught dead on their set by having his character be high all the time. “Brody just changed his delivery, his investment in it,” Schwartz says. “His style shifted to such a degree that we felt like we needed to account for it creatively. “We were like, ‘Well, how do we explain his lethargy on-screen?’”
For Brody’s part, he may have become more polite over the years, but he hasn’t gotten any more interested in hiding his disdain for those later episodes: “In terms of engagement as a whole, I’ll just say that they’re different shows, Season One and [the later seasons],” he notes in the history. “Had the quality been the quality of Season One, I’m sure I would have been a lot more engaged.”