I distinctly remember sitting around the collage table of my summer camp’s “Art Barn,” cutting out images of smiling blonde women from waterlogged copies of Brides magazine with other soon-to-be seventh-grade girls, when suddenly it dawned on me: My friend Ali’s last name was Brody. “If you marry Adam Brody, you won’t even need to change your name!” I told her, and all of us dissolved into jealous sighs. If you were a tween girl in 2004, it was more or less a given that you wanted to marry Adam Brody, known then for playing the sweet, nebbish-y misfit Seth Cohen on The O.C.
That day in the Art Barn was almost two decades ago, and since then, I’ve come out as queer and more or less stopped dating cishet men (unless Nick Kroll is, for some reason, reading this). Yet my obsession with Brody has gone absolutely nowhere—something I quickly understood as I watched him embody a hot rabbi on the new Netflix series Nobody Wants This. Any handsome, weed-dabbling rabbi would be liable to inspire a little Hot Priest-adjacent ardor, but it’s specifically the casting of Brody—who turned Seth Cohen into one of the first genuinely crush-worthy Nice Jewish Boys (or NJB, as they’re known within the tribe) on mainstream television—that has unlocked my extremely predictable millennial passions.
The impact of Cohen’s adorkable stammer and addiction to comic books has been well-documented; in a 2023 article for the Daily Beast, writer Kerensa Cadenas joked that Brody’s all-consuming cuteness had “ruined a generation of people.” Sure, he was far from a perfect boyfriend to gorgeous, clothes-obsessed Summer (Rachel Bilson), but he still managed to reel viewers in with his combination of rumpled-haired, T-shirt-clad awkwardness and not-always-earned confidence.
In fact, looking back on the show now, I wonder if the appeal of Seth Cohen was his imperfection. Many of us had become accustomed to leading-man characters on TV who were basically John Wayne trying to pass as a high-school boy, from Henry Winkler as Fonzie on Happy Days to every single male actor who ever appeared on One Tree Hill. Brody, too, was an adult playing a teen (he was 24 when the pilot episode of The O.C. aired!), but he was also genuinely funny and a little bit whiny and really into indie music—or, in other words, a recognizable, even attainable guy, beneath the patina of teen-soap celebrity.
While the appeal of a guy who makes you Death Cab mixes for Chrismukkah is, and was, largely self-evident, I also wonder if there was a little bit of (gasp!) queerness wrapped up in my Seth Cohen obsession. His long-nursed crush on Summer is, after all, basically the aughts equivalent of Jay Gatsby reaching for the green light on Daisy Buchanan’s dock, and I wonder if a not-at-all-conscious part of me realized, even in seventh grade—a year when I created a shrine of Abercrombie models torn from magazines on my bedroom wall—that I identified with Seth’s longing for the girl of his dreams.
Yes, Seth was my forever crush, but was he also…a means by which to stare at Rachel Bilson’s big brown eyes and shiny hair as much as I wanted, secure in the excuse that I was simply studying how to be the kind of girl that a guy I capital-L Liked might like himself? The girls I once sat around the collage table with and I are all in our 30s now, and I have to hope we’re all letting the respective soft animals of our bodies love what they love. I, for one, am now bisexually secure enough to admit that I had (and have?) a crush on both Seth and Summer, and even though I’m a little mystified by how red-faced and giggly I get every time Adam Brody steps onscreen on Nobody Wants This, I’m trying to respect my long-ago tween self’s selection of a crush that has improbably lasted the test of time. Leighton Meester, you’re a lucky woman!