Outer Banks appears to be avoiding the mistakes of The O.C.

SFGate

"The most obvious antecedent to Outer Banks is The O.C., which premiered on FOX 17 years ago and was a cool show for, like, five episodes," Drew Magary says of the Netflix teen drama. "Then all the bad guys suddenly turned good and the whole thing became a twee sitcom. Outer Banks doesn’t make the same mistakes. The bad guys STAY bad (especially Charles Esten, who plays Sarah’s dad: a character who will routinely enrage you with his ability to convince other people that he’s NOT a bad guy). The good guys are not high on their own pop culture references the way Adam Brody’s O.C. character was. This is not that kind of show. This is a soap opera, and it’s a good one. The majority of soap operas now exist either in the form of reality TV or trainwreck docs like Tiger King. With the exception of the Shonda Rhimes empire, scripted shows rarely bother venturing into these sudsy waters. I wanna call Outer Banks quality trash (and I have), but that’s just putting an asterisk on a show that’s genuinely arresting and has the best love story I’ve seen on screen since… well s---, I have no clue. When’s the last time you watched something romantic that didn’t have the dreaded suffix 'comedy' appended to it? Titanic? Outer Banks takes its love story deadly serious, and thus so did I. It was nice to watch a love story just be a love story for once, without a Joss Whedon one-liner barging in on the action. 'Oh, so this is the part where we make out huh?!' Outer Banks is the kind of show that’s flawed in ways that are fun to argue about." ALSO: Ranking everything on Outer Banks.