One Tree Hill: The Complete Fifth Season

Review By: Dan Deevy
DanDeevy@TheCinemaSource.com

For a show like One Tree Hill the sound of graduation bells is generally the signal of impending doom creatively. Once those feisty, smart talking kids are let out of high school and lose on the world it’s tough to know what to do with them. Keeping groups together for legitimate reasons during that period is really tough to do with any sense of believability; after all college is a very singular experience and regardless of how close a group of friends can be, individual desires end up hurling them all to different parts of the globe.

Take One Tree Hill’s immediate predecessor good ol’ Dawson’s Creek. When it came time to head off for even higher learning it led to a very awkward place story telling wise. I mean, whose grandma moves with them when they go away to college? It was a weird but necessary twist to keep some parental figure present in the show on a regular basis, nevertheless it seemed odd. And putting Dawson in L.A., Pacey on a boat somewhere and the rest of the cast in Boston kept things more realistic but it also drastically strained the storyline.

So what did the kids on the Hill do to avoid this bizzarro-land time frame – they skipped over it! No, seriously. The beginning of season five picks up four years, six months and two days after the finale of season four in an episode aptly titled, ‘4 Years, 6 Months, 2 Days.’

When we first see everyone a lot has changed and we have very little explanation of how or why things have happened. I thought it was a very clever way of going about it that really hasn’t been done before. We spend the whole season checking in with flash backs discovering why things turned out the way they did, which somehow has made that difficult time period easier to maneuver through.

Just to briefly catch you up with our pals, Lucas Scott (Chad Michael Murray) is now a successful author having published one hit book with another on the way and he is dating Lindsey (Michaela McManus) his editor. I know, when last you saw our poetic small town lothario, he and Peyton had FINALLY gotten together for what seemed like forever, so what happened? Well, thank God for the flashbacks to come.

Peyton Sawyer (Hilarie Burton) is working as a low level assistant at a record label out in L.A. for a real scumbag of a producer. Needless to say her dreams of discovering new bands and bringing that new musical talent to the attention of the world have not yet been realized.

The gorgeous and ever determined Brooke Davis (Sophia Bush) has taken her fashion line ‘Cloths Over Bros.’ to the highest levels and is now incredibly rich and famous and living in New York. The no nonsense powerhouse business woman Victoria (Daphne Zuniga) steps in as the CEO of the company and ...