There is not too much I can say about the OC that hasn't already been said. A show about the modern "Aristocracy," a show that permits us to be fascinated and allured by rich, excessive lifestyles. I often say it's sort of a modern day Jane Austin type of allure. And it is a great source of escapism, watching these over-priviledged kids and the drama between them. I think it's interesting how we are shown the community of Newport - the viewer is supposed to identify with the outsider character.
The viewer and Ryan's character are both new to Newport, and view it with the same fascination and apprehensiveness. I don't think the show could have done nearly as well had it been only about the rich people int he OC. Since Ryan is poor and underpriviledged, there is a contrast in views. And his poorness and "hard life" make him cool, make the viewer sympathize with him. Both the viewer and Ryan view Newport with a critical eye, but at the same time are attracted to and drawn into the excess and glamour of the OC lifestyle. Ryan's character is what permits us to be so fascinated by the show. He is our window into the OC. At least in the pilot episode, the viewer is made to sympathize with him so much because he represtents what the OC is not. That's why he seems so "badass." But the msot interesting thing is that his characgter absolutely has to be white. It's the onyl way the viewers could sympathize with him, and it is probably the way Sandy Cohen would have brought him home. Can you imagine him being a Latin American character, perhaps the son of immigrants, working class, with an accent. If that character would have been brought into Newport, the Cohen family and the nieghborhood in General would surely have treated him differently, would surely have been less accepting. And the viewer would have a harder time connecting to him because more emphasis would be placed on cultural differences. The default is whiteness. You're far more likely to find an impoverished, troubled youth of color in Ryan's predicament, but the show would not have played out like it did.

The layout of Tropic of Orange is very interesting. By organizing the sections by time, it shows exactly what each character is doing at the same time. It shows how different things like rain and car crashes effect each character differently. The semis exploding hindered Gabriel's ability to do his job...it gave Emi something to do for her job. It meant nothing to Buzz, being in the Watts area and having to travel on foot. The rain surprised Emi and Gabriel from their seat in the fancy LA restauraunt, but it meant for the Margerita character that she had to pack up her things and move off the street, which meant she couldn't sell her fruit, which meant she couldn't make money that day. By not showing each character at different times, emphasis is made on the differences between each character's lives, the neighborhoods they live in, the realities they face each day, and the troubles they have.
The style of narration is very interesting. For some characters it is in the third person. Some it is the first. For Bobby it's a story being told by another person, a working class latino person. We, the reader, are mostly members of the literary community, most likely educated, and in many ways are part of an "elite." We never hear accounts of living in Watts and what the people in the streets are doing straight fromt he horses mouth, it had to be narraterd to us by a writer, by someone like Gabriel, or someone like Yamashita. The differences between the characters are accentuated further by different narration devices. You hear the events of Bobby through the retelling by someone else, just like we would be more likely to hear about Bobby in real life from someone other than Bobby. The Murukami character does not speak in the first person - we get a very lofty, colorful, and extremely writerly account of him from a narrator's voice. His experiences are not as important as what we as readers and writers and the "elite" make of them and have to say about them.