Fun fact: During my teaching days, I lived at home with my parents. And my parents — and this is odd — have always had a habit of going all in for primetime teen dramas. We watched Beverly Hills, 90210 as a family when I was too young to understand why Brenda thought she might be pregnant with Dylan’s child. When I was at home after college, we’d all gather around the TV once a week, just a charming young dude and his mid-50s parents, to watch The O.C.

It came in handy at work, where I found I otherwise had very little in common with high-school girls. But it turned out they all watched The O.C. too, so I’d try to equate as many interactions as I could from history and literature to the goings-on of Ryan and Seth in the most recent episode. Now, Duke University is apparently using that show as the basis for a half-credit “house course” associated with its English department. So that’s about the best thing to come out of Duke since Ken Jeong.

Before I stumbled into a job writing about baseball, I planned to enter academia. One of my long-term goals was always to teach a class about Arrested Development, mostly as an excuse to watch it a bunch more times then spend a bunch of time talking about how great it was. This seems like a good step in that direction.