He got his tart producing the Drama series The OC, with 27 episodes commissioned for the first season.
The show was set to air during the American Summer Hiatus, just before the start of their Baseball Season. The shows pilot aired three times before it got a following making the next 7 episodes of the show highly crucial.
The characters gained a huge following making them the most recognisable characters on television at the time.
Since then, Josh Shwartz has gone on to produce other hit teen dramas, including; Gossip Girl, Hart of Dixie and most recently The Carrie Diaries.
“The idea behind that was that Orange County sort of had a very distinct musical sound at that time—there was sort of a scene coming out of there. I always viewed it as wanting the music to feel like an extension of the emotional lives of the characters, which I guess sounds kind of pretentious. When I was sitting down to write the pilot, there was this Joseph Arthur song that plays at the end of the pilot, and when I heard that song, it was like, ‘Oh, okay, this is how I want the end of the show to feel.’ That it was less about the place and more about how our characters were feeling. It was a lot of the music that I was listening to, that other writers were listening to, that the actors were listening to. We didn’t have a lot of money for music back then, and it just happened to be indie rock that we were all listening to. It was cheaper to license, so that was a happy accident."
- Josh Shwartz
&Kathryn