01:00 AM EDT on Friday, June 10, 2005

BY ANDY SMITH
Journal Television Writer

Josh Schwartz said he plans to talk about failure in today's commencement speech to The Wheeler School.

Failure?

Providence native Schwartz, who went to Wheeler for 11 years, is the creator of the very hip TV show The O.C., on Fox. When he created the show, he was 27, one of the youngest people ever to have his own hour-long drama on a major network.

"I want to tell them it's not always going to be easy," Schwartz said yesterday, sitting in a conference room at Wheeler. "I don't want people to think that I just walked in and got a TV show."

Schwartz said he created a film script and two TV pilots that never got produced. He tried to do stand-up comedy in college and got nowhere. He remembers plenty of "bad meetings with agents" before he was a success.

"I'm going to be very pessimistic. I want to bum them out," Schwartz said.

Schwartz said he wrote the speech on the plane ride to Providence.

"I like working on a deadline," he said.

Schwartz is 28 now, but he doesn't look that much older than the Wheeler students who shook his hand and occasionally asked for an autograph. He feels older, though.

"It's kind of surreal," he said. "It's a very nice honor to be asked to speak. It doesn't feel like it's been that long [since he went to Wheeler] but when I look at the seniors, they seem like kids to me."

Schwartz grew up on the East Side of Providence, not far from Wheeler. His parents, Honey and Steve Schwartz, are toy inventors and executives.

"My dad calls during every commercial break and tells me what he thinks," Schwartz said.

After Wheeler, Schwartz went to California, first to the University of California at Los Angeles and then to film school at the University of Southern California.

The O.C. is set in affluent Newport Beach, Calif., which is in Orange County -- that's where the O and the C come from.

The central premise of the show, which just finished its second season, is that hunky bad-boy Ryan Atwood (Benjamin McKenzie) is taken in by public defender Sandy Cohen (Peter Gallagher), whose wife comes from big money and can afford a lavish home in Newport Beach.

Once in the O.C., Ryan becomes a member of the family, befriends the Cohen's geeky son Seth (Adam Brody) and hooks up with Marissa (Mischa Barton) the beautiful-but-troubled girl next door.

One of the things that makes The O.C. work is that Schwartz creates two interlocking sets of storylines, one for the teenagers and one for their parents.

"A lot of people tell me it's the one hour a week where kids will allow their parents to hang out with them," Schwartz said.

Naturally, The O.C. ended this season with a cliffhanger. Sandy Cohen's wife, Kristen, has gone off to a rehab center to deal with a nasty vodka habit.

Meanwhile, Ryan's brother, Trey, has just been shot by Marissa.

Schwartz said he found out that success can create its own set of problems in a show's second season: Expectations are higher, from the network, from fans, from critics. You can't fly under the radar anymore.

New plot developments, and perhaps new characters, need to be introduced without jeopardizing the elements that made the show a success in the first place.

Essentially, Schwartz said, this year's O.C. involved pulling everyone apart and then allowing them to come back together.

Obviously, Schwartz can't talk about future developments on The O.C., although he did drop one hint:

"The big trump card for Ryan is his father. That would create huge issues for Sandy -- if Ryan's father ever shows up."

As for Schwartz's future, he plans to stay focused on The O.C. Plans for him to write another show, set in a New England college town, are on hold.

"There was pressure to write another show that would not be an O.C. spinoff," Schwartz said. "So I wrote the show, and everyone said 'OK, how do we make it a spinoff?' Ultimately, I thought it was too distracting, and that the time wasn't right. The O.C. is still my baby, and my focus right now is on The O.C.'s third season."