One Tree Hill

Creator Mark Schwahn gives One Tree Hill a serviceable reason for all its teenage anguish: two half-brothers who cannot keep their rivalry off the basketball court. It is a decent, conventional soap, with enough feeling to make some familiar quarrels matter. The series understands how completely a young person’s life can be occupied by winning, fitting in and being noticed. It is less good at allowing those preoccupations to seem briefly ridiculous, which makes spending time with this company harder than it needs to be.

Chad Michael Murray’s Lucas Scott and James Lafferty’s Nathan Scott give the programme its clearest source of tension. Their family connection makes the sporting rivalry difficult to dismiss as ordinary competitiveness. We were more caught up in the basketball than we expected, because the brothers make losing feel humiliating in ways that reach beyond the score. The sports scenes give their hostility something concrete to work through, and the actors benefit from having more to do than discuss it.

Hilarie Burton’s Peyton Sawyer belongs to a teenage ensemble whose appeal is its recognisable ordinariness. These young people can be self-absorbed without becoming impossible to care about, and their hurts seldom feel negligible just because the situations are familiar. The performances are more persuasive when they let that hurt stand without insisting on its importance. There is enough vulnerability here to explain why we might forgive a predictable exchange, although the writing too often relies on that forgiveness.

The basketball also makes good use of the programme’s visual polish. Billy Dickson, Stephen Thompson and Peter B. Kowalski are among the credited cinematographers; the attractive North Carolina photography gives a modest setting a proper claim on our attention. The sports scenes have the energy the family disputes sometimes lack. Crucially, the handsome presentation does not make the teenagers seem too remote from ordinary life.

Elsewhere, the polish helps less. Stan Salfas is among the editors, and some emotional exchanges last longer than their familiar grievances warrant. Music contributors include Mark Snow, and the music is too willing to reinforce the programme’s solemnity. Alan Hook is among the production designers; the town is pleasant enough to spend time in, but has little character beyond the people arguing in it.

The main limitation is the familiar collection of relationship and family problems in Mark Schwahn’s series. A teen soap can revisit jealousy and sibling resentment as often as it likes, provided the people involved keep finding ways to surprise us. Here, the writing spends too long explaining grievances we have already understood. A little humour would help the characters live with one another, and would help us live with them.

That leaves a programme whose appeal depends heavily on an appetite for its particular kind of seriousness. Episodes run 42 minutes, and the first season has 22 of them: there is room to grow attached, but familiarity is a substantial part of the bargain. The brothers’ competition is a sound reason to begin. If the first few family quarrels try your patience, there is no particular virtue in persevering.