i love this show, and i will definitely be a regular watcher. i got to see it early because it was available for free on itunes. i loved the o.c. before it started going downhill in the third season, so now i have a new guilty pleasure.
i was curious about the books after having really enjoyed the pilot episode. i bought the first one, read it, and hated it. imo, the show is taking a much better direction by not being 100% faithful to the book series. half of the storylines and characterizations in the books would not have translated well on screen at all. the main characters were very two dimensional, and they were written in a way that made none of them likeable or interesting. i read the second book just to see if perhaps it would grow on me, and the story only got worse.