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On this episode of Drama Queens, Sophia Bush, Hilarie Burton Morgan, and Bethany Joy Lenz are rewatching the pilot of One Tree Hill, eighteen years after it aired. It brings back a ton of memories: Bars and antique stores they used to frequent together in Wilmington, the 2000s fashion trends they were into, the huge crowd outside MTV they couldn’t believe was for their show, Hilarie’s brush with an alligator on set, Joy’s trouble with pigeons during filming (“there’s a lot of wildlife in this episode,” Hilarie comments), Bryan Greenberg’s guitar, and so much more. They talk frankly about how young and scared they felt, too, discovering that they had all been “deeply terrified and enamored of each other.”
Hilarie remembers that the show was originally called The Ravens, and had been pitched to her as a sort of “aw-shucks, small town kind of thing,” she says. But then The O.C. came out and got really high ratings, so One Tree Hill felt they had “to turn up the sexy – it was like a bait-and-switch!” And was “hard on us, because we were pretty demure in regular life,” Bethany adds. They all remember fighting the writers and creators about what their characters did and how far they would go, not only for themselves, but for the fans. “We knew we were speaking to a young audience, and I was constantly having conversations like, ‘Young girls look up to this character, I don’t want them to think this is normal or okay or that they should be treated that way,’” Bethany says. “There was this moral responsibility we felt….that was tough to navigate as a young woman.”
Hilarie asks them all what their favorite moment of the show was; for her, it might be Moira Kelly “ripping Dan a new one in the car dealership…..she’s so, so good and a little scary.” For Bethany, she says the big basketball game at the end was her favorite moment: the stakes were high, and the performances were great. Sophia talks about the “dynastic” element in the Scott family, with Dan Scott kind of like the king of this small town and pushing his sons to ascend his throne one day, but says she really related to the show when she saw Peyton alone in her car, listening to angsty music, instead of on the bus with the cool kids. “I have felt that. I get that,” she says. Hear all about the pilot episode and lots of behind-the-scenes memories on this episode of Drama Queens.
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