Big shows on campus

Can TV favorites like "The O.C." and "Veronica Mars" survive when their lead characters trade high school angst for college woes?

By Stephanie Zacharek

Read more: Stephanie Zacharek, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, College, Arts & Entertainment, Arts & Entertainment TV Features

Rachel Bilson, from "The O.C.," and Kristen Bell, from "Veronica Mars"

Nov. 1, 2006 | In 1999, at the beginning of the fourth season of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," Buffy Summers (Sarah Michelle Gellar) -- a teenager who has been specially chosen and trained to slay the demons and vampires who walk the earth, or at least her hometown of Sunnydale, Calif. -- leaves the wholly unpredictable world of Sunnydale High School for an even greater unknown: college. She and her best friend, nerd girl-turned-Wiccan Willow Rosenberg (Alyson Hannigan), enroll at U.C. Sunnydale and move into a dorm. There, Buffy takes an immediate dislike to her roommate (she steals the girl's toenail clippings, hoping to prove she's really a demon) and engages in the universal freshman ritual of drinking way too much beer (although this brew is laced with magic juice that turns everyone who drinks it into dopey but feral Neanderthals).

"Buffy the Vampire Slayer" may have been television's most perfect, wholly rounded teenage saga. Its creator, Joss Whedon, envisioned the series as "high school as a horror movie," a feat he and his writers pulled off for three seasons without resorting to gimmickry or clichés. But maybe even more remarkable is that the show's characters survived the transition from high school to college and beyond (and Buffy's friend Xander went directly from high school into the adult work force) without losing our interest, or our empathy, in the process.

"Buffy" is a tough act to follow, but this season, two shows about teenage life proceed bravely in its footsteps: In Josh Schwartz's rich-kid teen drama "The O.C." (which has its season premiere on Nov. 2 at 9 p.m. EST on Fox), Summer Roberts (Rachel Bilson) heads off to her first semester at Brown, and the ghost of her late best friend, Marissa Cooper (Mischa Barton), seems to have followed her. And in Rob Thomas' "Veronica Mars" (which began its new season last month on the CW) teenage private investigator Veronica (Kristen Bell) has just started at the fictional Hearst College: In one of her first classes, intro to criminology, she solves a murder-mystery exercise in a matter of minutes. But she's still very much tethered to home and hearth: Instead of moving into a dorm, she continues to live with her dad, Keith (Enrico Colantoni), although there's so much trust between the two of them that her autonomy isn't much of an issue. (You get the sense that even as a toddler Veronica claimed autonomy as her birthright, and Keith Mars just knew better than to stand in her way.)

These aren't the first shows since "Buffy" to pack their protagonists off to college: The mother-daughter Chip 'n' Dale routine "Gilmore Girls" is now nattering into its seventh season, but Rory (Alexis Bledel) enrolled at Yale several seasons ago. Since then, she's stolen a yacht and taken some time off from her studies, and now she's cracking the books once again.

I've never warmed to "Gilmore Girls," now on the CW, or even been tickled by its rat-a-tat pop-culture references. (Why on earth did Norman Mailer pick that show to guest-star on? Imagine Mailer on "Buffy," doing battle with the Hellmouth -- or, better yet, showing up as one of its denizens.) Since the end of "Buffy," "The O.C." and "Veronica Mars" have been where I get my teenage fix. The two shows are wholly different from "Buffy," and from each other, in the way they look at teenage life: "The O.C." is an unapologetic soap opera, with twists and turns so dramatic they're sometimes barely convincing. But as with all good melodrama, the emotions churned up by these wild events are always completely believable. (When Marissa Cooper was killed by a jealous, psychotic ex-boyfriend on last season's finale, her death felt like both a revisitation of a deeply familiar theme and a sucker punch -- like a reworking of the 1960 weeper-hit "Teen Angel" with the maudlin gloss toned way down.)

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