Where Is the CW Exposé Documentary?

By Emma Chance | Celebrity | August 2, 2024 |

By Emma Chance | Celebrity | August 2, 2024 |

How to adequately explain the influence of The CW on young minds in the early aughts? I grew up in a house that didn’t have cable, so I spent a lot of time in my neighbor’s basement, watching shows like One Tree Hill, Gossip Girl, and The O.C. (and eating her snacks— the house with cable was always the house with good snacks). The O.C. made such an impact on me that I wrote a paper in college in which I compared protagonist Ryan Atwood’s trials and tribulations to those of Beowulf from Beowulf. I got an A, but that professor was fired soon after, so, make of that what you will.

I remember there being a lot of nearly-naked people and raunchy, teenaged sex scenes on the CW, but our parents either didn’t know that or didn’t care because it was a channel marketed to young adults, so they probably thought it was safe. But with the recent reckoning of networks like Nickelodeon and the abuse child stars were put through in the same era, I’m starting to wonder when we’re gonna get the CW tell-all.

Well, former One Tree Hill stars Bethany Joy Lenz, Sophia Bush, and Robert Buckley fueled my hypothetical fire this week on the Drama Queens podcast. They recalled when the show was moved to the CW and how being on the same network as those other shows changed theirs.

“All those shows where it was so much, so much gratuitous whatever, like sex, sex everywhere,” said Lenz, who played Haley James Scott on OTH. “They just wanted to make sure that you guys had your shirts off on the beach. They wanted to make sure that somebody is naked in every episode.”

Bush, who played Brooke Davis, remembered how their co-star Austin Nichols was often the “sacrificial lamb,” or the one who always had his shirt off as Julian Baker.

Buckley came in later to play Clay Evans, but he remembered talking to a director about Nichols’ time on the show.

“It was during the time when Julian was just sort of being introduced, and he was like, ‘Yeah, it was when they were introducing Austin as the new sex pylon.’ And I went, ‘What?’ I had never heard the term sex pylon, but I have to say, when I was watching that vignette, and he’s just standing there looking amazing, I thought, ‘You know? It’s a bit objectifying, but sex pylon, that shoe fits. It tracks.’”

You know what? It seems like they’re handling it well after all, right? There is definitely no exposé material there.