The New York Times-20080129-They Age So Quickly- At Least In Tree Hill- -Review-

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They Age So Quickly, At Least In Tree Hill; [Review]

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The final moments of One Tree Hill last season raised questions, if not about the future of feminism, then certainly about feminism on teenage dramas on CW, the network that once offered a young Rory Gilmore with her Yale education and Martha Gellhorn journalistic dreams.

One Tree Hill ended in the spring with one of its lead characters, a sweet and well-intentioned grind named Haley, joyously going into labor in the middle of her valedictory speech at high school graduation, her 18-year-old husband bounding across the auditorium to catch her. You had to wonder how Haley had managed Advance Placement classes with morning sickness and who was going to call the National Organization for Women.

One Tree Hill returned a few weeks ago (for a fifth season, on Tuesdays) not as a more progressive enterprise, but as a more dramatically palatable one, trashier, less earnest and refreshingly, horribly unlike anything else in its genre. Forgoing chronological precision, it has flashed ahead right to the pummeled hopes and realized aspirations of two half-brothers and their core group of friends in Tree Hill, N.C., four years after high school. Everybody is a card-carrying grown-up now.

The great thing about this premise is that it skips over any potential for the misery that was Beverly Hills 90210: The College Years and centers the action in the small town where it all originated. The negative, of course, is that we never get to see how Haley balanced psych finals and colic, keg parties and vaccinations and just having to say no, presumably, to any chance of a junior year abroad in a hedonistic Western European capital.

In the wake of the discussion surrounding Juno and the horror over Jamie Lynn Spears, the show displays an almost aggressive aversion to moralizing about teenage pregnancy. Refusing to lay out the grim consequences of premature motherhood, it seems as if it wants to make fans on either end of the political spectrum stick their heads in fiery hampers.

Four years later Haley (Bethany Joy Galeotti), a teacher, isn't applying for food stamps or stripping to keep her child in clean pajamas; she is living instead in a nicely appointed house, dealing with middle-aged problems. Her 22-year-old husband, Nathan (James Lafferty), his pro basketball career curtailed, is having a midlife crisis, a situation coinciding with the arrival of a nanny who looks like Jennifer Garner and dresses as if she were competing for the title of Miss Caracas. He is also depressed, and we know this because his hair is longer than Brad Pitt's in Troy.

It is a sign of the kind of melodrama One Tree Hill practices that we discovered that Nathan was in a wheelchair only at the end of an episode in which the camera had spent the preceding hour shooting him from the shoulders up. Drunken bouts of bitterly throwing old trophies briefly followed. But the show doesn't revel in angst as much as it does in the opportunities it gives its characters to conquer and improve. Within the parameters of its ridiculousness, a sense of optimism prevails.

If there is something to love about One Tree Hill, it is the show's devotion to solid middle-class values, the sense that you pick yourself up (after, say, your father winds up in jail for murder) and just keep striving. One Tree Hill distinguishes itself by what it is not: a trust-fund soap.

Whininess isn't permitted for very long. Nathan's half-brother, Lucas (Chad Michael Murray), for instance, isn't thinking about writing a novel. Nope, he has already had one published, and it's called An Unkindness of Ravens. Even Brooke (Sophia Bush), the resident rich kid, with her own fashion company, is keeping it real as a young person, opening a small store in Tree Hill after bailing on New York and a magazine with her name on it. (Her mother doesn't approve because she is the kind of woman who summons her child to cheeriness with lines like, Let's see the face of a girl who is going to Italy tomorrow to approve the textiles for her fall line.)

Not one of the newly minted 22-year-olds on One Tree Hill blogs or dresses coolly or speaks cleverly or gives any indication of having learned anything at all in college. The portrayal of 20-somethings is so wildly inauthentic and unfamiliar as to make watching it feel like foreign correspondence. One Tree Hill is a no-arrogance, no-entitlement zone, and I'm (shamefully) happy to pull up and park.

ONE TREE HILL

CW, Tuesday nights at 9, Eastern and Pacific times; 8, Central time.

Created by Mark Schwahn; Mr. Schwahn, Joe Davola, Greg Prange, Mike Tollin and Brian Robbins, executive producers. A Tollin/Robbins Production in association with Warner Brothers Television.

WITH: Chad Michael Murray (Lucas Scott), Antwon Tanner (Skills), James Lafferty (Nathan Scott), Hilarie Burton (Peyton Sawyer), Sophia Bush (Brooke Davis), Bethany Joy Galeotti (Haley James), Lee Norris (Mouth McFadden) and Jackson Brundage (Jamie).

[Illustration]PHOTO: Jackson Brundage, left, and Chad Michael Murray in a scene from the new season of One Tree Hill on CW. (PHOTOGRAPH BY FRED NORRIS/CW)