The dog ate the guy's heart! In the hospital.... during surgery... You don't get more ridiculous than that. Even on a show like One Tree Hill, which was filled with semi-implausible storylines, this was pushing it. But it's moments like this that make fans miss the show and search for more like it. While the show certainly has its fair share of controversies, it also gave us Chad Michael Murray and Sophia Bush... and we should be thankful for that.
But we should also be thankful to The Ringer for publishing an oral history on what many deem the show's most ludicrous (and ludicrously entertaining) moment... When the dog eats Dan Scott's (Paul Johansson) heart during his heart transplant.
Here's how and why they did it...
Dan REALLY Had To Suffer To Get To His Redemptive Moment
During the interview with The Ringer, the show's creator, Mark Schwahn, and a bunch of the writers discussed Dan Scott's heart transplant. The character had served as the show's arch-villain for multiple seasons and the actor who played him was desperately searching for his redemption moment. The fact that he was suffering from hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (due to a car crash, being kidnapped, and various other traumatic events) was definitely a step in that direction... However, Dan had done some pretty repulsive things over the course of the series... so, he had to be 'pushed to the brink' before he could get his redemption moment.
"Dan was being put through so much," actor Paul Johansson said of his character. "Like—how bad can we treat Dan? [I thought] I’d never be allowed on an airplane again or something, you know? And it kept going. I think in a way, they wanted me to be treated so badly that the audience would just go, 'Oh man, he’s really had a hard life.'"
To get the audience to say that about the villainous character, the writers of the young adult primetime soap opera came up with some pretty ridiculous story pitches.
"What you should know first about that writers’ room: It was a joke-heavy room," One Tree Hill writer John A. Norris said. "Just to paint you a picture of the types of joke pitches that were in this room, someone had a pitch in Season 1—back when it was still a basketball show and the two brothers [Nathan and Lucas] hated each other—that there was a nuclear bomb in the town and you couldn’t get close to it, but the off button was in the middle, so the town had to vote which brother shot a basketball to turn it off. It was a lot of joke pitches, you know? You’re in a room all day, you get a little stir-crazy, and you come up with jokes."
So, you can see how some of these wild ideas eventually got boiled down to slightly less crazy ideas and made the show incredibly memorable.
"Now, my mother will tell you that Dan was her favorite character and she felt sorry for him," One Tree Hill creator Mark Schwahn said. "I just felt like, we don’t want Dan’s redemption to be too easy. We don’t want him to get a heart transplant and have it be too conventional. We want to take him to the edge of hope and then see what he’s made of. I just thought, 'What’s an absurd way of this guy getting really close to getting this heart transplant and not getting it?'"
The Real-Life Story That Turned Into This Outlandish Moment
Eventually, one of the show's writers, Bill Brown, initiated the idea when he was speaking about his own dog constantly eating stuff off the floor.
"He had an English bulldog named Gromit," script coordinator Bryan Gracia claimed of Bill Brown. "He used to sneak it through security to bring him into the writers’ room every once in a while. But yeah, Gromit would eat anything."
This led to the joking pitch of the golden retriever eating Dan's heart after it had been dropped on the floor. The idea wasn't supposed to be anything more than a joke... but it got Mark Schwahn thinking...
"I just started thinking about it, and I thought, you know, we’d all heard stories about someone getting their animal stoned or whatever. So I thought, this guy is stoned, his dog gets into his stash. He’s not making good decisions at this point because he’s high, and he loves his dog so he takes the dog to the hospital. And of course, the receptionist is lecturing him: 'Sit your stupid a** down and I’ll call you a veterinarian.' So he sits down; the dog’s leash is there. … The dog’s stoned so he’s hungry. And he wants a snack."
This would have been an interesting idea if it weren't for the absolute implausibility of it all. In The Ringer interview, Eugene Storozynsky, MD, Ph.D., the director of Cardio-Oncology Clinic at the University of Rochester Medical Center, said, "There would be absolutely no way that a cat or a dog or any other animal would ever be found inside a hospital."
But Mark Schwahn really liked to push his story ideas on One Tree Hill. By that time, the writers and actors trusted him. So, they pushed the idea through and the rest is history...