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The often laughably silly teen melodrama starring Sophia Bush finally comes to an end....
Warner / 560 Minutes / 2011-2012 / Unrated / Street Date: April 10, 2012
This writer is an aficionado – no, let’s say sucker – for melodramatic television. I have quite an indie-flick collection and if anyone wants to discuss Kenneth Anger or Maya Deren with me, I’ll definitely be able to keep up, but while my heart and mind continue to be deeply enamored with cinema as an aesthetic entity, there’s something that keeps drawing me into the vortex of television. Gilmore Girls, Battlestar Galactica, Twin Peaks, Lost – if any show can put a hook into me, I’m absolutely devoted: I’ll happily catch every episode.
But every season of One Tree Hill I've sat through has been loonier and more incomprehensibly unbelievable than the last. In The Complete Fifth Season, we watched as the show creators decided to future-tilt their show by setting it almost five years ahead of the end of the season before, and the results (while interesting from a structural point of view) were uneven at best. But if The Complete Seventh Season was an all-out stall, this final hurrah of the teenybop series is unequivocally dull.
Yes, we're allowed a summation - we get to see how everything ends for the One Tree Hill crew - but even though that flash of release washes over us as the final credits of the series finale pops up, One Tree Hill in its final hours is laughably undernourished. We focus mostly on Brooke (Sophia Bush) and her husband Julian (Austin Nichols) as they get used to their new career as parents, and the show comes full circle in a way with Chad Michael Murray (one of the central brothers from the show's early days) reappearing to finish off his character arc. But all along the way, we get nothing but trite melodramatic claptrap.
Again, the whole melodrama of the thing is enough for One Tree Hill to hang its hat on - it's shitty TV, but you'll likely find yourself commenting affectionately on the show's shittiness as you watch episode after episode after episode - but I color myself amazed that the thing still had as much gas as it did. For those who have seasoned the storm that is One Tree Hill, please run (don't walk) to celebrate yourselves by finishing the game with this final go-round box set. Otherwise, turn your focuses to more important things like philanthropy... or reruns of Gilmore Girls....