The One Tree Hill Reboot Can Fix the Original’s Problematic Past With Women’s Basketball

Remember when Nathan Scott hit that no-look free throw? For teen drama fans, that moment is loaded with a metric ton of nostalgia and iconography. But I watched One Tree Hill for the first time in 2023. A League of Their Own had just been canceled, and female-focused basketball series Big Shot had just suffered the greatest indignity of the streaming era with Disney+ jettisoning it into the void. While Nathan’s Season 3 free throw was chased with the undeniable comfort that I had six more seasons of Tree Hill basketball ahead of me, a voice in the back of my head yearned for women’s sports stories that lasted this long. And maybe they could with One Tree Hill’s reboot.

One Tree Hill’s First NBA Arc Exemplified the Show’s Underlying Problem With Women

After a high school point-shaving scandal, a career-altering injury, and a brief stint playing SlamBall alongside Joe Manganiello, Tree Hill’s Nathan Scott was finally called up to play in the NBA. It was an event six seasons of television in the making. As someone specifically pitched One Tree Hill two decades after its debut based purely on my reputation as a basketball lover, I was thrilled to have NBA plotlines on the horizon. And what was the first arc I was treated to in the highly anticipated next step of Nathan Scott’s professional basketball career? Let me check my notes. Oh no, this can’t be right.

I don’t know why I was surprised when Season 7 introduced audiences to Renee Richardson, a pregnant woman attempting to financially extort Nathan by claiming he knocked her up during his rookie year. As this excruciating plotline continued its seemingly never-ending chokehold over the first half of Season 7, One Tree Hill tried to spice things up by peppering a degree of doubt about Nathan’s side of the story. But it was obvious that Nathan had not cheated on his wife Haley, because the Renee plotline was a perfect microcosm of One Tree Hill‘s underlying gender politics.

Tree Hill, North Carolina is a stressful place. One where there’s always a menacingly promiscuous woman lurking around the corner trying to gain something from a man. Renee’s staged infidelity scandal resembles Rachel Gatina’s short-lived marriage to Dan Scott, a dynamic wherein a woman tries to sidle up to a man in a position of power for her own financial advantage. But One Tree Hill also boasts a veritable stable of would-be homewreckers and baby snatchers like Nicki, Rachel, Taylor, Gigi, Renee, Alex Dupre, and Nanny Carrie (who’s lowkey a Tree Hill triple threat as she tried to break apart a marriage, steal a child, and commit homicide). Nearly every one of the characters mentioned above had a scene in the series where she offered herself up naked to a man in an established relationship and was subsequently rejected.

In this cycle, the male romantic partner comes across as noble by simply not committing adultery and the female romantic partner is justified by the plot to call the oftentimes cartoonishly evil other woman something along the lines of “hoe bag” or “skank ass”. By the time Renee and her fresh load of lies come a-knockin’, the audience has already run through this same exact dramatic beat several times in Nathan and Haley’s relationship alone. But there’s something particularly insidious about Season 7’s anti-believe women opening salvo as someone who watched One Tree Hill with a modern-day awareness of the accusations leveled against the show’s creator Mark Schwahn.

Beyond being sexist, tired, and alarming in the context of Schwahn’s alleged behavior towards women, it just sucks that the Renee Richardson saga was One Tree Hill‘s first NBA storyline. The existing motif that Renee played into was merely a small thread in the tapestry of One Tree Hill‘s complicated relationship with women. And there was certainly plenty of good mixed in with the bad. Though sometimes the teen drama’s more glaring issues, particularly regarding the representation of women and people of color, get glossed over with rose-colored glasses, the series, and its characters are beloved for good reason.

That’s why, unlike the many wary detractors online, I feel cautiously optimistic about the Hilarie Burton and Sophia Bush-helmed One Tree Hill reboot. Here’s hoping that the ball is in their court, both figuratively and literally this time.

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I always found it asynchronous that counter-cultural icon Peyton Sawyer and academic overachiever Haley James both became cheerleaders for the Tree Hill Ravens. I’m tempted to applaud One Tree Hill for not confining its female characters to one neat box, but given Schwahn’s track record writing women, this instead comes across as if a cheerleader’s the only role in which he can conceive of women existing within the sports ecosystem. Even upstart broadcaster Gigi Silveri is not motivated by a passion for basketball, but rather a passion for ogling basketball players.

Let me say this loud and clear: cheerleading is a sport. And even though every major cheerleading character in One Tree Hill‘s high school years dated a basketball player we were fortunately still granted arcs about their routines, competitions, and athletic achievements. I’d welcome a return to basketball fundamentals in the One Tree Hill reboot, one in which cheerleaders still play a role, just not the only role.

The world of nostalgia-motivated television reboots is tricky. To say it’s hard to please everyone would be an understatement, as One Tree Hill‘s reboot has already received a bevy of negative outcry before it has even gotten underway. Rumors that Chad Michael Murray, Bethany Joy Lenz, and James Lafferty might not be returning for the reboot have fans understandably up in arms. However, the series could benefit greatly by focusing on the future of Tree Hill, not its past. (In other words, the series might actually want to be anything other than what they’ve been tryna be lately.)

I’m willing to acknowledge that I might just be bitter that women’s basketball series like Big Shot and Long Slow Exhale were not only canceled but subsequently thrown into the streaming void, but I’d be vastly more interested in a show that focuses on the athletic aspirations of young women like Sawyer Scott and Jenny Jagielski alongside those of young men like Jamie Scott than the drama of One Tree Hill’s legacy characters. One Tree Hill‘s reboot could pass the baton of unifying small-town basketball to a new generation, one that embraces women’s involvement in the sport more holistically.

One Tree Hill is available to watch now. The reboot is currently without a release date.