Entertainment

'The O.C.' Affair Graph You Never Knew You Needed

by Kristie Rohwedder

At some point during the second or third season of The O.C. in its original run, two of my friends and I took it upon ourselves to chart out all of the relationships on the Fox primetime soap opera (we’re the coolest, I know, I know). We’d lost track of which characters dated, which characters were related, and which characters had tried to kill each other. An O.C. relationship map was necessary.

Our infographic was crude, to say the least; the hand-drawn chart was our ramshackle version of a detective’s investigation board. On a single sheet of paper, we drew dozens of rectangles, and each rectangle housed a character’s name. Using a ruler and Crayola markers, we drew lines to connect the boxes: blue meant “hooked up with,” purple meant “related,” green meant “broke up with/divorced,” and so on. It wasn’t long before the marker lines began to overlap and bleed together. Before we knew it, we were looking at a lot of murky brown splotches. It was an incomprehensible mess. Like Seth Cohen on his way to Tahiti, we gave up shortly after we began the endeavor.

I never thought that 10 years later, I would be attempting a similar feat. But hey, here I am. This time around, things are different. Rather than try to identify every single connection, I stuck to ONE relationship link type: affairs that rocked The O.C. world. And as for the chart? This one is 1,000,000x prettier than the disaster my friends and I cobbled together.

Using every last bit of what I learned in high school statistics (get ready), I've bar graph'd The O.C.’s most scandalous relationships, hookups, and dalliances:

Image: Warner Bros. Television; Dawn Foster/Bustle