Here’s the reason why Mischa Barton’s character was killed off on ‘The O.C.’

It was her, or the present.

Twenty years after teen cleaning soap “The O.C.” made its much-discussed debut on Fox in 2003, creator Josh Schwartz and producer Stephanie Savage have revealed the first motive behind the shock demise of standard character Marissa Cooper (Mischa Barton) on the finish of the third season — the community bigs wished rankings.

“We had been…below super stress to do one thing with that degree of drama. Killing a collection common got here down from the highest,” Savage told Vanity Fair. “If we wished a season 4, we’d should do one thing like that.”

Barton was one of many faces of younger Hollywood within the early 2000s; her character died during the Season 3 finale after being in a automotive accident attributable to her ex-boyfriend Kevin Volchok (Cam Gigandet). She had been along with her longtime love Ryan Atwood (Ben McKenzie) on the time and she or he handed away as he held her.

Schwartz and Savage stated they knew instantly that they’d made a mistake.

“It’s one thing that we remorse, and searching again on it, we want we might have give you a special resolution,” Schwartz advised a reporter.

“We didn’t see an alternate path on the time, which is why we went down that street,” he famous.

Schwartz — whose different credit embrace CW’s “Gossip Woman” — mirrored on different routes the manufacturing staff might have gone to fulfill the highest brass.

“In hindsight, there have been a number of different methods we might have written the character off the present — and given Mischa the break that she wanted and wished — that also would’ve allowed for that character to return,” he stated.

The viewers’ reactions to Marissa’s premature demise “didn’t really feel good,” Schwartz continued.

“It didn’t really feel like that viewers had been served or revered in the best way that we all the time wished and aimed to. Instantly, we had remorse at that time,” he stated.

Schwartz advised The Every day Beast in 2017 that the choice boiled right down to a number of points reminiscent of “inventive, solid chemistry, rankings.”

“Mischa didn’t need off the present any greater than any of the opposite children wished off the present,” Schwartz stated on the time. “It was a complicated chemistry with the solid…however she definitely wasn’t actively searching for to go away the present.”

“The O.C.” was renewed for a fourth and closing season in 2006. The present ended its run in 2007.