The O.C. Producers Say Killing Off Marissa Was a ‘Terrible Mistake’

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Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage both say killing off Marissa Cooper in the season-three finale of The O.C. was a “terrible mistake.” In a chapter from Alan Sepinwall’s upcoming oral history of the show (excerpted in Vanity Fair) the cast, crew, production, and Television Without Pity commentariat all discuss the reasons Mischa Barton was essentially fired from The O.C. — and why, in hindsight, those reasons sucked. “Any rewatch or reevaluation of a show that came from a time before the present is going to require a tough look at our treatment of women overall,” says recapper Daniel Blau Rogge. Savage looks back at how Barton was isolated on set and simultaneously thrust into the Perez Hilton celebutante ecosphere and at how those things might have contributed to the decision to kill off Marissa. As Barton “was going to nightclubs with Paris and Nicole and being in Perez Hilton, she was more her own island. In retrospect, I think that was a very scary, dangerous island that she shouldn’t have been on by herself,” Savage says. “We had the ability to give her a little tugboat to go back and forth. And we didn’t do that, and I regret that.”

Former Fox programmer Yvette Urbina says then–Fox Entertainment chairman Peter Liguori was “the one that wanted Marissa to die, so let’s start there.” According to Savage, there was pressure from the network to kill off someone important, and there was never any real thought about offing Seth (Adam Brody), Ryan (Ben McKenzie), or Sandy (Peter Gallagher). “Adam and Ben would have happily been killed,” she says. Kelly Rowan (Kirsten Cohen) recalls her character almost dying in a different car crash. To this day, she doesn’t understand the decision-making process behind getting rid of Marissa. “I thought it was the biggest mistake they were going to make,” Rowan says. “That whole foursome, the chemistry with those four actors, screwing with that, I thought, was a big mistake.”

Savage says she knew the storyline was a mistake from her first viewing: “The first time I watched it, I watched it with Josh and Matt Ramsey, and I was just bawling. I was like, What have we done? Not just that it was sad that Marissa died but that we made a terrible, terrible mistake.” Schwartz didn’t realize the plot was in error until the fandom erupted. “All of these voices on the Internet and early Tumblr exploded like a primordial howl from the early Internet into the night sky,” he says. “Of grief, disbelief, anger — way louder than any voices had ever been complaining about the direction of the character. I very quickly realized, Oh my God, what have we done? I think we made a terrible mistake.”