“possible actor’s strike”??  I can’t take it! 

‘One Tree Hill’ picked up for coveted sixth season

By Amy Hotz
Staff Writer
[email protected]

The CW announced Monday that One Tree Hill would be back for a sixth season, drawing comparisons from locals to another long-running made-in-Wilmington teen drama, Dawson’s Creek. It’s a comparison those involved with the show relish.

“It’s sort of unimaginable,” said Mark Schwahn, One Tree Hill’s creator.

Also picked up by The CW were dramas Gossip Girl, Smallville and Supernatural, the comedy Everybody Hates Chris and reality competition America’s Next Top Model.

The CW is the latest network to announce early pickups for next fall, a move likely influenced by the shortened pilot season brought about by the recent writers strike. The network did not, however, announce how many episodes it would commit to producing. The CW publicist Jeff Tobler said specifics would not be known until the May 15 “upfront” presentation, when The CW will present its fall schedule to advertisers.

Schwahn is crossing his fingers for 22 more episodes.

“I don’t know if we’ll get 22 episodes next year, I think we will. … I think that pulls us even with Dawson’s Creek. Dawson’s Creek is a huge, big, wonderful show that when you come to Wilmington to make a pilot, you have this specter of this show looming over you and it seems unattainable to go as long as they would,” he said.

Local crew members expressed a relief in knowing that after wrapping the recently ordered six episodes to be filmed for season five, they’ll go on a short hiatus and get right back to work.

Michael J. Hall, a construction coordinator on the show who also worked on Dawson’s Creek, was “a bit surprised” to learn the show had been renewed. Hall learned about the sixth season approval when called by the Star-News for comment. He was in New Orleans working on a feature film.

“Yee ha!” he said. “I came here to do a show during the strike, and I was unaware that after the strike was resolved, they’d come back and shoot a few more episodes for season five. So I’ll definitely be home for season six.”

Being able to work at home means a lot to Hall, and knowing that the jobs are going to keep on coming is an even bigger relief.

“On Dawson’s, we kind of knew that we’d have a fifth and sixth season at the end of the fourth, which is very rare in this industry that you’d have time off knowing you were going to have a job,” he said.

A sixth season for the show, which employs between 125 and 150 locals, is good news for the local economy, said Johnny Griffin, director of the Wilmington Regional Film Commission. In the past, One Tree Hill has spent roughly a million dollars an episode, he said, “If they order 12 or 13 or 22, that’s how much more we’re going to get in the local economy.”

Also, Griffin said, EUE/Screen Gems Studios did not have anything on its calendar going into the summer or fall because of a possible actors’ strike this summer.

“We’re waiting to see what’s going to happen there. But it’s good to know that at least when that all gets resolved that we at least have one project that has already committed and will be here,” he said. “Keeping our name out there in the television world is important for us as well, for other companies to see the success, that it’s still working, that it’s not just a trend from the past with Dawson’s Creek or something.”

In the CW announcement, the network alluded to One Tree Hill’s appeal to female viewers ages 18-34 as a reason for the show’s renewed popularity. Schwahn says he thinks all that success can be attributed to one thing – jumping ahead four years in the story line. This season, the show skipped the characters’ college lives and picked up four years after their high school graduation.

“I believe that’s the single factor responsible for this sixth season pickup,” Schwahn said. “It proved to be invigorating to the cast, to the crew, to the writers and to the audience. The numbers are up this year, which is very rare for a show that is having a fifth season … You know, the kids have graduated high school and usually you start to see a creative decline in shows of that ilk … Shows have survived it for a couple of years, but no show has been creatively better than it was before. And this show is.

“I actually had said today, even, not anticipating an early pickup, I said, ‘I feel more confident about a season six than I have any other season.’ And it turned out to be true.”

The One Tree Hill pickup is just the most recent good news for Wilmington’s film professionals. HBO confirmed Thursday that an adaptation of the BBC series Little Britain will begin filming here this month.

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