Our Cover Is Blown: TV Says We’re Hip

A recent story in the Arizona Republic suggests that offspring as old as twenty-somethings might be willing to embrace the previously unthinkable notion of taking a vacation with their parents.

On one condition: the family heads for Orange County.

Must be the desert heat.

Forget Malibu, the Sunset Strip or the Hollywood Hills. In fact, forget Los Angeles completely. It is so “not what’s happening.” And Chino? Uh-uh.

Nope, the place to be these days for the hip, young crowd is the O.C., popularized by the Fox TV series.

This newfound hipness has been chronicled before. Last year, USA Today designated us (I’m proud to be a resident) as the nation’s “new capital of cool.” But, according to the Republic’s pop-culture writer, Jaimee Rose, Orange County is now so cool that kids will agree to hang with their parents. There can be no greater testament to a place’s allure.

Arizonans have long flocked to San Diego in the summer, Rose notes: “The coast is the Arizona getaway. It’s 120 degrees here and I’m not exaggerating. It’s so awful hot; that’s where we go.” But now another coastal California county is attracting their attention.

“There’s nothing like a TV show ... to make you hip,” she says. This new O.C. is forcing me to revise everything I tell friends and relatives from afar who wonder what it’s like to live here. In the pre-hip days of the 20th century, I’d always say the county was the quintessential suburb: malls, two-car garages and Little League. Orange County wasn’t cool and didn’t want to be. The whole idea seemed to be that the less people knew about the place the better -- so they wouldn’t want to move in.

Now, Fox has gone and blown our cover. The network premiered “The O.C.” last summer and is convincing a whole generation of kids that the O.C. is where it’s at. The show has produced its own lingo, style and culture.

The show’s website features the latest groovy quotes, like this one: “So, what’s the GP, RA?” That, of course, is someone asking series character Ryan Atwood about the game plan.

Get it? If so, you’re halfway to being cool.

In her article, written for the Republic’s travel section, Rose describes Orange County as “a fusion of materialism and great beauty. Paradise here goes something like this: watching the sun dip into the ocean for the night, the sky every color you’d want it to be, the beach glistening as it should, a sailboat in the mist, and observing all of this from the front door of a Banana Republic.”

It would be too predictable -- and not very sporting -- for me to note that the real O.C. is more than the coastal party scene depicted in the series. Rose knows that, too, because she treks over here a few times a year to visit friends. She’s well aware that the show isn’t about La Habra, Placentia or Stanton.

“I think you [Orange County] are hip, but more than anything, it’s a very wealthy place along the coast,” Rose says of the ritzy part of the county. “And wealth begets hip. Having more money kind of dictates the styles. I don’t think it’s hip in the sense of creating new and wonderful fashions or ideas to follow, but it’s showing us where the bar is.”

Who can say how high the bar is, or how long it’ll stay where it is. But as a guy from Nebraska who remembers as a teenager taking family vacations to Kansas City, I have to concede that Orange County can seem pretty cool.

Except, that is, to Nana the New Yorker on “The O.C.”, who, in one of the series’ more memorable moments, lamented, “Oh God, what am I doing here? I hate this state, I hate the sunshine, I hate the ocean, I hate Schwarzenegger.”

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821, at dana. parsons@latimes.com or at The Times’ Orange County edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626.