One Tree Hill: The Complete Eighth Season

That I've seen multiple seasons of One Tree Hill is something that confounds me. I still have a hard time telling characters apart and typically refer to them by broad signifiers (the slutty chick, the guy that looks like Ken Marino, Daphne Zuniga's daughter) mainly because they're all boring, stupid, white and have the exact same terrifyingly myopic worldview, which lacks any and all discernment and humour. It's hard to distinguish episodes, since they all follow the same blasé format, with someone cheating, breaking up, suffering a workplace folly or doing something vicious like fudging their taxes or stealing a boyfriend. Occasionally, Nathan's (James Lafferty) hog-faced son, James (Jackson Brundage), will do something precocious, exacerbating the already bountiful "ick" factor, but mostly it's just a bunch of privileged white assholes whining about superficial crap while embracing a Disney-like morality that I suspect doesn't stray far from the dominant ideology in pre-WWI Germany. Only, in this season, there's a bit of embarrassing arty flourish when Clayton (Robert Buckley) and Quinn (Shantel VanSanten) are shot and transported to a generic beach where they wrestle with mortal quandaries (LCD or plasma?) while waiting to see if they're dead or alive. It's almost as exciting as Brooke (Sophia Bush) and Julian's (Austin Nichols) wedding. Because the only thing less exciting than watching board, upper-middle-class ciphers yap about their Feng Shui and investment strategies is watching them hold narcissistic functions where they celebrate their class-sanctioned "love." And to drive the generic, heteronormative tedium home, Haley (Bethany Joy Galeotti) spends the season preggers, which is standard issue for a show that features a hurricane episode and a Hangover-style bachelorette party. It's all vile, grotesque and exceedingly condescending, but the actors look like early '90s softcore porn stars, giving board office girls something to fawn over. Included with the DVD are supplements on the zombie makeup in the Halloween episode, some "Making of" filler and some reflections from the cast on the magic that was season eight.