It’s a story about fathers and sons. Family, really. It’s a story about friendship, love, chasing dreams, and quietly brings the fact that what you do matters to attention in small and beautiful ways.
One Tree Hill is a story I will always revisit. I just finished watching it for the second time and I’m still in love with the storyline, the characters, and the way the writer of the show, Mark Schwann, shows what relationships, friendships, growth, and love is all about through fictional characters in a North Carolinian town called Tree Hill.
It follows the life of friends and rivals, it touches on real life issues like gender, drugs, and weight. It’s a story about bridging gaps in high school between the cool crowd and the seemingly uncool crowd. It brings to attention how your decisions — whether good or bad in life — never really leave you and have the capacity to follow you around.
One of the main story lines throughout the show is that about brotherly rivalry. It opens with the tension between Lucas Scott and his half brother Nathan, who both love basketball, but are complete opposite in personality. Lucas plays on the ever visited River Court in Tree Hill and Nathan plays on the High School basketball team. Lucas loves literature and has a good head on his shoulders despite his father abandoning him. Nathan is popular, feels pressured by his father, and doesn’t do well in school. The only thing these brothers have in common is their love of the game and their father, Dan Scott, who is the villain everyone wants to love and hate at the same time throughout the series.
Another running storyline is that of Dan Scott and his older brother Keith. Keith is a mechanic, does good to the people around him, and encourages Lucas to be a good man instead of pressuring him, playing the best friend role to his mother and father-role in Lucas’s life. Dan on the other hand has a very strained relationship with his wife and son, has left Lucas and his mother, runs a successful car dealership, but lacks in general heart and makes rash decisions based upon his jealousy toward Keith. Dan Scott is a great example throughout the series of what bad decisions can do to a person and how remorse, regret, playing victim, and how lack of good relationships can lead down a road of complete loneliness and despair.
One of the best things about the show is watching Nathan become a good man because he doesn’t want to become like his father. He learns from his bad decisions and decides to take ownership over his choices throughout the series, which makes him such a great hero.
While the bigger story lines take a huge precedence over the show and it’s theme, it also has a slew of relatable characters like best friends Brooke Davis and Peyton Sawyer, who are part of the main crowd in seasons 1-4. They both go through a bunch of heart breaks, fights, and crazy moments, but both come back with a vengeance and strength any girl could look up to. Haley is Lucas’s best friend, smart, and a huge light in the entire series. Then there’s minor characters like Mouth, Skills, Junk, and Fergie, who all hang out with Lucas on the River Court and eventually become larger parts of the story in later seasons.
One Tree Hill is a becoming of popular, undirected, and parentless characters that turn into good people after years of depending on their friendships and good influences like Karen and Keith. On the other hand, it’s also about good people like Lucas and Haley becoming greater people as they learn that boundaries between social groups break when they let new people inside.
It quietly shows that everyone’s not so different after all, and that’s what I love about it.
Each good character makes decisions based on their passions and dreams, while the evil characters make decisions based on hurt. Underlying story lines and big events keep the television drama going, but the general undertone of the entire show is that relationships we have to own up to and tend to matter and so do the choices we make in our lives.
I’d encourage anyone who hasn’t watched One Tree Hill to do it. Anyone who takes a chance on it and sticks it out will find a place in their heart for the North Carolina town and its characters like I have. There is something for everyone in this show. It’s for the popular, but it’s also for the underdog. Mostly, it’s for the dreamers, and I believe everyone has a dreamer waiting to be awakened inside, and if television shows do that for you, you can add One Tree Hill to your list.
