Fox puts Orange County on prime-time map

RANCHO PALOS VERDES, Calif. -- The young girls' ball gowns are pristine white. Jewels sparkle at their throats. The young men's tuxedos are natty. Carnations sprout from their buttonholes. The grown-ups appear prosperous and proud.

But in a flash, the atmosphere changes. There's a man down on the marble dance floor, felled by a fellow partygoer's brutal punch. A beautiful girl rushes forward, leaning over him and exclaiming, "Daddy, Daddy, are you OK?"

No wonder the makeup instructions on the day's call-sheet read: "Jimmy's bloodied; Marissa's tears."

Jimmy Cooper is a wealthy financier. Marissa is his debutante daughter. Played by Tate Donovan and Mischa Barton, they're pivotal characters in Fox's new drama series "The O.C.," premiering at 8 p.m. Tuesday.

The hour-long show is the network's latest attempt to capitalize on an exclusive Southern California milieu. "The O.C." is set in Orange County, once considered a suburban backwater -- as compared with famously hip "Beverly Hills, 90210" or "Melrose Place" -- but now catching on as a new hot spot for cool culture.

The Warner Bros. television production was created by 26-year-old Josh Schwartz. He's from Providence, R.I., but went to film school at the University of Southern California, which, he says, many wealthy Orange County children "are sort of bred to attend."

That gave him "some outsider insight into that world," which he utilized at a development meeting at the production company formed by McG (director of the "Charlie's Angels" films), who did grow up in Orange County.

Schwartz hopes his show, which he says has nothing to do with the 2002 comedy film "Orange County," will play universally. He describes it as exploring situations and emotions -- "like the stuff of (John) Cheever short stories of East Coast suburban angst, except that it's just warmer and the people are healthier!"

Warner Bros. doesn't shoot the series in Orange County, opting for Los Angeles County coastal communities such as Malibu and Rancho Palos Verdes.

Few in the cast are from California. Seventeen-year-old Barton's home base is New York. Peter Gallagher, who plays Sandy Cohen, a Bronx-born lawyer who has moved West, lives on the East Coast. Kelly Rowan, who plays Cohen's wife, is from Canada. Newcomer Benjamin McKenzie, who plays a teenager from the wrong side of the tracks taken into the Cohens' home, is from Austin, Texas.

When asked what he knew about Orange County before landing the role, the 24-year-old McKenzie replied: "Nothing."

"I still don't!" he added.

Aware that he's playing the complete outsider -- the audience's conduit into "The O.C." world -- McKenzie has deliberately avoided checking out the real scene. Instead, to better understand his back-story role, the actor spent time hanging around malls in less prosperous communities of Southern California.

Gallagher says this series about a wealthy enclave appealed to him because "it's an interesting notion as to how much you can really protect and isolate your lives from the rest of the world, and, really, how good an idea is that anyway!"

On this sunny summer day, the set is in a banquet hall at Ocean Trails Country Club on a bluff high above the Pacific. Purchased last year by entrepreneur Donald Trump, the place made headlines in 1999 when land on its golf course shifted about 55 feet because of a broken sewer line.

Although not part of "The O.C." plotline, this instability seems apt for a series about gloriously glossy surfaces hiding some ugly rotten faults.

The scene description for the cotillion reads: "a beautiful beginning ends in disaster." As the cast waits for the cameras to roll, they muse on the theme of the show, which Fox publicity describes as "nothing like where you live. And nothing like you imagine!"

"By the end of the first season we'll probably be poor and have no money and my dad will be in jail," Barton laughingly teases.

Then, still looking gorgeous in her expensive strapless gown, she steps back onto the set to resume those tears over her battered dad.

"Daddy, Daddy, please get up. Somebody help us."