When you ain't got nothin'...

...you got nothin' to lose. At least, that seems to be Josh Schwartz's attitude at the start of this much-improved season of "The O.C." An excerpt from today's column:

"You hear that news" about "Grey's Anatomy" and the smaller episode order, "and you suddenly become zen, or as zen as a neurotic Jew like myself can get. I actually feel like some of the decisions we made last year were made about ratings. The network was getting darker and edgier, and we were trying not to get canceled. We've always tried to walk a line between being part of a genre and tweaking it, and I think last year the genre side won out. A lot of that was because it felt like it was stuff we had to do. There was a lot of carnage."

Faced with a no-win timeslot and a network that, as he puts it, is "clearly moving in a diffrent direction," Schwartz and his writers decided to get back to "just doing the show."

NJ.com finally got the story up. To read the rest, click here.