ANHATTAN BEACH, Calif.
When you see Josh Schwartz on the set of "The O.C.," Fox's hit teen drama, it's easy to mistake him for one of the casually hip actors who pretend to be high school students on the show. But Mr. Schwartz is no actor, and his days on the set are rare. Most of the time, he's holed up in his modest Hollywood apartment, where he has spent the past year furiously writing or revising every one of the show's first 27 episodes.
It has been quite a year for Mr. Schwartz. Almost overnight, the 27-year-old has gone from obscure screenwriter to the youngest person in network history to create and produce his own one-hour series. The show, broadcast on Wednesdays at 9 p.m. (8 p.m. Central), is the season's highest-ranked new drama in the coveted 12-17 and 18-34 age brackets. Since it went on the air last August, Mr. Schwartz's script for the pilot has been nominated for a Writer's Guild Award, and he was signed to a multimillion-dollar deal by Warner Brothers to keep him producing "The O.C." and developing new shows. And in the strangest tribute yet, a law students' club at the University of California, Berkeley, has formalized its devotion to Sandy Cohen — the feisty public defender played on the show by Peter Gallagher — by establishing the Sandy Cohen Fellowship to support work in the Orange County public defender's office.
Mr. Schwartz has arrived at this point without so much as a day's previous experience on the staff of a TV show. "I have never seen anyone take to this medium as quickly as he has," said Marcy Ross, Fox's senior vice president of current programming. "I mean, sure, he's lost a lot of weight, he's falling apart, he does nothing but work. But he was born to do this."
Until recently, Mr. Schwartz's achievement would have been all but unthinkable. Network television was a strict dues-paying culture. Writers sweated it out for years on other people's shows — earning arcane titles like "executive story editor" and "supervising producer" — before getting a shot at creating their own. But lately those rules are being rewritten. "Networks are now clamoring for fresh voices that they otherwise would not have looked toward," said Rick Rosen, a partner at the Endeavor agency, which represents Mr. Schwartz. "And that includes feature writers and younger writers with less experience." The list of those who made the leap to show creator without first apprenticing on a staff includes J. J. Abrams ("Felicity," "Alias"), Anthony Zuiker ("C.S.I."), Hank Steinberg ("Without a Trace") and Ryan Murphy ("Popular," "nip/tuck"). These writers aren't so much creating new television forms as they are endowing familiar ones — the detective show, or in the case of "The O.C.," teen drama — with freshness and intelligence.
Last month, sitting in his tidy office at Manhattan Beach Studios, where the show is filmed, Mr. Schwartz recalled the "Trojan horse" strategy by which he got Fox's attention. He was developing the show with McG (the director of the "Charlie's Angels" films) and McG's producing partner, Stephanie Savage. "We knew Fox was looking for their next `90210,' " he said — "Beverly Hills 90210," that is — but " `90210' was not a show I watched or particularly liked or wanted to do." A lifelong Cameron Crowe fan, with a framed "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" poster on the wall beside his desk, he had always preferred quirkier character-driven shows, like "Freaks and Geeks," "Undeclared" and "My So-Called Life." "You can't tell a network that's what you want to make because they'll just say, `Those shows lasted 15 episodes and they're off the air and we don't want them.' But if instead you go to Fox and say, `This is your new "90210" ' — that's something they can get excited about."
So Mr. Schwartz and Ms. Savage cleverly constructed a pilot — the tale of Ryan Atwood, a gentle young hoodlum who finds himself living among the beautiful people of the titular Orange Country — that pushed every glamour-teen button they could think of. "That's why it's got a bonfire on the beach, and `Karate Kid' without the karate, and a fashion show and a big bash with cocaine," he said. At the same time, however, "we felt we had this story that was organic to that world of beaches and sunshine and wealthy people. And really what we hoped we had were these characters that were a little bit funnier and more soulful and different and specific than the kinds you usually see in that genre. They would be the soldiers inside our Trojan horse."
