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Drama Queens Sophia Bush, Hilarie Burton Morgan, and Bethany Joy Lenz are finally rewatching the show that catapulted them into fame: the popular 2000s teen drama One Tree Hill. They’re on episode six of the first season, “Every Night Is Another Story,” which has plenty of iconic moments from Sophia’s famous “rectangle plus one” monologue to Nathan and Lucas finally bonding. They laugh about how the cheerleader uniforms “shrank by half” since the pilot episode: “Where did the rest of the tops go?” Sophia begs to know, while Hilarie declares, “I still blame The O.C.” There’s a bit of foreshadowing about Keith and Deb getting together that Joy loves. Plus, Brooke spends some time dancing in front of a webcam in this episode; does that make her the original TikTok girl? “Brooke also invented Uber,” Sophia replies, “but it’s fine.” And of course, they all remember the romantic pull of a perfect mixtape, sharing their favorite mixtape memories and recalling the feeling of waiting for hours, fingers poised over the "record" and "play" buttons, for that one song to play on the radio. "Mixtapes were not for the faint of heart," Sophia laughs.
Several huge things are treated very casually in this episode; when the other basketball team pulls a gun on Nathan and Lucas, for example, or how Peyton and Haley leave their injured, drugged-up friend alone in the car on the side of a lonesome highway. “Girls, don’t do that!” Hilarie commands. “You piggyback her into town!” They also don’t feel the pill pushing storyline aged well, in light of all the ramifications of the opioid epidemic. “It was handed out like freaking candy back then, so that the kids are being so playful about it is such a horror show now,” Hilarie says. “It feels cringey,” Sophia agrees. However, they do like how much their own characters got to be silly together in this episode. “It was just the girls the whole time – just us being goobers,” Hilarie says. In real life, the actresses were just becoming close friends, so the feelings on screen of their characters bonding felt very genuine.
The episode also felt like a reintroduction of the characters and their relationships, because when it was originally airing, it was gaining more and more viewers every week. And unlike now, you couldn’t go back to the beginning; you had to watch whichever episode was on. So the writers were taking a stab at helping new viewers orient themselves, resulting in Sophia’s fan-favorite monologue about the “love rectangle plus one, whatever that is.” Despite it feeling like a standalone episode, it still moved the story forward a lot, revealing more about Nathan and Lucas, Dan and Keith, and Deb and Karen as well as the three girls. Hear all their analysis of the show, memories from set, answers to listener questions, and more on Drama Queens.
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