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Maria Menounos, one of our favorite TV personalities, turned 38 yesterday. Her birthday prompted us to think back to her role as Jules (AKA Emily Chambers) on the teen drama One Tree Hill. It’s not just the most insane character that Menounos herself has played, but rather one of the most insane that anyone has ever played on a prime-time show.
Jules is introduced at the beginning of season two when she, seemingly randomly, decides to buy a car from Keith Scott at his brother’s, Dan Scott, dealership. But nothing happens by chance. The two start dating and it seems like the kind of love that could perhaps help Keith get over his crush on Karen.
If something seems too good to be true, it usually is. Viewers soon learn that Jules is not actually Jules at all! #Intrigue. Jules is really Emily Chambers, a girl on the run from an abusive relationship. With no money to pay for the medical bills that came about as a result of the abuse, Jules put an ad in the paper saying she’d do anything legal for money. And boy did Dan Scott, Tree Hill’s resident bad guy, come up with quite a doozy for her.
Dan hired Jules, uh Emily, to make Keith fall in love with her and then break his heart. That is not how you treat your brother, Dan! While these antics took it a little far even for Dan, the guy who abandoned and disowned one of his sons’, he felt like he needed to get revenge. Whatever for, you ask? How about Keith sleeping with Dan’s estranged wife (and his sort of sister-in-law), Deb! Yep, Tree Hill is one big incestuous circle.
So, that happened. And Dan was, well, Teresa throwing a table levels of angry. Except Dan is way too calculating to simply flip a table and yell. So he did the next logical thing by setting up a way for his brother to get his heart broken. Seems reasonable.
The big glitch with Dan’s whole evil plan is that Jules actually falls in love with Keith, which is totally reasonable since Keith is wonderful, sweet, and generally perfect. When Keith proposes, Jules accepts and it looks like a happily ever after ending may be in the cards for Keith after all.
This all comes tumbling down, however, when Karen finds out Jules’s true identity. Karen does what she assumes is the right thing, and confronts Jules on her wedding day. Jules runs off, leaves Keith heartbroken, and Dan gets his wish without even working for it.
It’s all very upsetting and prompts Keith to move away, Dan to add another trophy to his evil genius collection, and Jules to become just another speed bump on Keith’s road to almost happiness. (That happiness is only almost achieved because Dan ruins it (again) by shooting and killing Keith in season three, but that’s a story for another day.)
The Jules story is just one in an insane line of cray cray stories on One Tree Hill. From a psycho nanny to an overseas kidnapping, Jules is really just the first time OTH showed audiences how far it was willing to go (read: really, really far) and, thus, set itself apart as one of the best teen dramas of its time.
