Hopelessly Devoted: One Tree Hill

I have never in my life walked out of a theater in the middle of a movie I didn't like. Nor have I ever stopped reading 80 pages into a bad book or turned off a baseball game in the seventh inning when my favorite team was down 18 to 2. I'm a glutton for punishment, I suppose. Or maybe I'm just an optimist.

Readers who know me even a little would almost certainly disagree with that last statement—I'm pretty sure I heard my parents guffaw incredulously 3000 miles away—and, for the most part, they'd be right to. In spite of all my best efforts to look on the bright side or see the silver lining or do something else equally clichéd and cloying, I somehow inevitably manage to find and fixate only on the bad stuff. Except, oddly, when it comes to entertainment.

For the record, it's not that I don't recognize when a film is terrible or someone's writing is crummy or a defeat is imminent. I do. I just can't help hoping that things will take a turn for the better—that a surprise ending will redeem an otherwise subpar cinematic/literary experience or that my beloved boys in blue (go, Dodgers!) will come from behind and not break my spirit for the millionth time since I first pledged allegiance to them 17 years ago. Sometimes—as in the case of Identity, the 2003 John Cusack vehicle that started out as a third-rate horror flick but ultimately evolved into a not-awful psychological thriller—my dedication to a cause pays off. And other times—like with Game 5 of the 2009 National League Championship Series between Los Angeles and Philadelphia—I wind up in the fetal position on my floor, wailing to no one in particular about how CLOSE we were to a Yankees-Dodgers World Series and how, OH, MY DAD, we let the Phillies beat us for the league title TWO YEARS IN A ROW and NO WONDER I'm incapable of maintaining a healthy relationship—MY HEART IS HARDENED FROM YEARS OF CRUSHING DISAPPOINTMENTS JUST. LIKE. THIS ONE.

More often than not, unfortunately, the outcome is a letdown. You'd think I'd have learned by now to cut my losses early and invest only in things that are actually good (rather than things I'm hoping will eventually be good), but I haven't. I'm stupidly, irrationally committed to seeing stuff through—especially when it comes to TV. I very, very rarely abandon a show halfway through the series, even after it has jumped the shark or gone the way of the dodo or fallen victim to some other animal-related metaphor.

Aside from needing to vent about the NLCS debacle, I bring this up because it explains, to some degree, why I watch One Tree Hill.

If you've never seen the show, you can't possibly know how significant it is that I continue to devote an hour of my life to it on a regular basis. And I'm not really sure if I can put it into words. This is a series that (spoiler alert) has had not one but two certifiable psychopaths. (Maybe three, if you consider recent promos featuring Amanda Schull's character, a tennis protegé who sets her sights on Nathan's sports agent and—shocker—just happens to be a dead ringer, no pun intended, for the guy's late wife.) The first lunatic, in Season 4, was a scary-obsessed stalker who pretended to be Peyton's long-lost half-brother, Derek, in order to get close to her—and who later locked her and her best friend in the basement during prom and tried to kill them both. The second, in Seasons 5 and 6, was Jamie's nanny Carrie, who abducted little Jamie at a wedding, held his dying grandfather hostage in some random cottage in the middle of nowhere, then chased Jamie and his 22-year-old mom through a cornfield while wielding an axe. A cornfield. I kid you not. Oh, and let's not forget the gang's "regular" villain, Dan Scott, who impregnated two women within a few months of each other, blackmailed his wife into postponing their divorce while he ran for mayor, paid another woman to make his brother fall in love with her, killed said brother in cold blood, and then used his crime to make money as an allegedly reformed motivational speaker. (Those, by the way, are just the highlights. Dan's crazy runs deep. So does the show's. In one of the most ridiculous moments ever in the history of television, a dog actually ate Dan's heart—or, rather, the heart he was supposed to get in a transplant. It was cramazing. I laughed for, like, 10 minutes straight. And then I realized it was intended to be dramatic, not funny.)

Anyway, the point is: One Tree Hill is totally absurd. I could list more examples to prove it (and I may, in a future post), but for now, I'll just leave it at that.

So, why do I continue to watch it? The short answer is that I can't not, for the reasons I explained earlier. I've been with the show since the very beginning—my roommates and I watched it together in college—and I'll no doubt be with it until the very end, too. It's just my nature. But also: It's one of those things, like The Room or any movie ever on Lifetime, that's so terrible it actually comes back around to being awesome. I make fun of it (and myself, for watching it), but I seriously kind of love it. How could I not? I mean, a dog ate Dan's heart. (I will likely repeat that at least twice every time I mention the show on this blog. It's that excellent.)

Sources say chances for an eighth season of One Tree Hill are about 50/50, and as much as I cherish the show's crazy every week, I'm honestly not sure which way I want it to go at this point. Part of me hopes it gets renewed so I can postpone the almost certain letdown of its ending and spend another delicious year in senseless soapy denial, but another part knows that every episode I watch now is an hour of my life I'll miss later, when I'm curled up on the floor crying about how I gave the series the best years of my life and FOR WHAT—a few laughs, a psycho nanny in a cornfield, an organ-eating pooch, Stuart Minkus' return to television, and a frequently shirtless Robert Buckley?

Actually, that doesn't sound like such a bad deal. Carry on, Mark Schwahn.