James Van Der Beek Dawson Leery

When Dawson’s Creek first debuted in 1998, it set a new precedent for “teen drama.” One that, arguably, had been helmed by the short-lived but still deeply influential and impactful My So-Called Life. The latter aired on ABC for just one season from 1994 to 1995 before it ended (later, the series’ cancellation would be, in part, “blamed” on Claire Danes, who wasn’t interested in continuing with the rigorous schedule of shooting for TV). Yet the response to the show’s too-soon end (featuring a cliffhanger that still haunts to this day) from young viewers who at last saw something on television that reflected their own fraught teenage years was a sign of things to come. A way paved for a show as “angsty” and “emo” as Dawson’s Creek to come along. And when it did, it made its way onto the still rather germinal WB network, which was launched in 1995 with The Wayans Bros. as its first show.

It didn’t take long for the “motif” of WB programming to pivot well away from The Wayans Bros.-type fare (though it did have a few other major “Black series”—including Unhappily Ever After, The Parent ‘Hood and Sister, Sister) and opt for showing primarily teen-oriented shows geared toward, let’s face it, a pointedly white demographic. Dawson’s Creek fit that bill in spades, becoming the series that cemented the WB as the “teen network” (this also after Buffy the Vampire Slayer found success on its airwaves just a year prior to Dawson’s Creek). And it didn’t hurt that its “flagpole” show had a twenty-year-old heartthrob playing a slightly nebbish fifteen-year-old who hadn’t yet grown into the power of his looks/being a “nice guy.” Though, of course, retroactive examinations of the show can find plenty of ways in which Dawson was a douche. Even so, his “niceness” was supposed to be the thing that set him apart from other male archetypes of the time. Indeed, there’s no denying that Dawson Leery was an early mainstream blueprint for promoting male sensitivity over machismo. Even if, to Josephine “Joey” Potter (Katie Holmes), that sensitivity doesn’t seem to make him emotionally intuitive enough to see that she’s been in love with him for years.

Although the show quickly became a phenomenon, seeping into various facets of pop culture, it was still easy (both then and now) to poke fun at. One of the earliest examples of that occurring at the 1998 MTV Movie Awards, when Holmes and Van Der Beek appeared in a pre-taped segment as their now indelible characters. Tasked with helping to introduce the award for Best Action Sequence, Joey climbs up through Dawson’s window as usual and sees him (in true meta fashion, as is Kevin Williamson’s “calling card” of that era) watching the MTV Movie Awards, eventually suggesting that they ought to “create a little action sequence of their own.” Soon after, the unmistakable theme song to the show, Paula Cole’s “I Don’t Want to Wait” (later swapped out [but luckily, only temporarily, as time has told] for the less iconic “Run Like Mad” by Jann Arden when someone decided to cheap out on the rights to the former), starts to play as they do an ultra-slow lean in (helped by the fact that they’re already quite far apart).

The host of the show, Samuel L. Jackson, then climbs in through the window and starts smashing the stereo so the song will stop playing. Because already in 1998, barely a full year into the airing of the show, the masses had grown sick of “I Don’t Want to Wait” and its automatic association with Dawson’s Creek. As had certain parents even slightly paying attention to the “loose” sleeping arrangements of Dawson and Joey grown sick of the “suggestions” being paraded around in the show.

Perhaps this was best crystallized in 1999’s 10 Things I Hate About You, when Bianca’s (Larisa Oleynik) dad, Walter (Larry Miller), snaps at her, “What’s normal? Those damn Dawson’s River kids sleeping in each other’s beds and whatnot?” Then there was the other source of eventual irritation about the show, which was the quick post-season one predictability of Joey and Dawson’s on-again, off-again relationship, as prone to shifting with the winds as a sailboat in Capeside. This would lead to such eye-rolling, but “all in good fun” instances as the show getting mocked in a one-off segment in Seventeen called “Dawson’s Creaky,” about how Dawson and Joey will still be discussing whether or not they should be together in their “rest home years.”

Of course, loyal viewers of the series eventually found out that Williamson didn’t opt to go the theoretically “safer” route by putting Joey and Dawson together in the end, as might have been foretold by fans during the initial seasons, before the Pacey Witter (Joshua Jackson) plotline came along to create one of the most famed love triangles in pop culture history (sorry, The Summer I Turned Pretty). A triangle that had most viewers guessing up until the last minutes of the series finale as to how it would end. Indeed, to layer on the meta-ness that had become Williamson’s signature by then (see also: Scream), Dawson had, by this portion of the show (that is to say, the two-part finale…or “coda,” to use a specific D’s Creek reference), become the writer and producer of a hit series called The Creek.

Having achieved such a feat by the age of twenty-five, Dawson is able to easily revisit his “high school memories” (considering they weren’t very long ago) and decide how to fictionalize them for the series, grappling with how to end the first season just as Jen Lindley (Michelle Williams) dies of pulmonary congestion…a very “soap opera” fate, to be sure. Though, funnily enough, it’s Jack McPhee (Kerr Smith) who tells Joey, Dawson and Pacey at the beginning of “…Must Come to an End” (Part Two to “All Good Things…”), “She’s got a few requests. No maudlin soap opera theatrics [this being another meta moment considering how much ‘soap opera theatrics’ play into Dawson’s Creek]. She wants the room drama-free and full of laughter. No tears.”

In the aftermath of Jen’s death, Joey and Dawson sit together outside of the Leery house, where Dawson tells her he’s still struggling with how to end the first season of The Creek. Joey advises, “Make it a happy one please. I can’t take any more sad ones.” And so, for Williamson to make it, in some sense, a “happy” ending for everyone, whether they were Team Dawson or Team Pacey, Dawson replies, “It doesn’t matter who ends up with who. In some unearthly way, it’s always gonna be you and me… What we have goes beyond friendship, beyond lovers. It’s forever.” This allows Joey to be with Pacey in “real life,” while Dawson gets to “have her” on The Creek. That the trio can still be friends (after Joey chooses Pacey once and for all) without any jealousy between them was also a somewhat evolved perspective for 2003, when the finale aired.

Granted, it might not have been “evolved” for Joey and Dawson to, inevitably, prove the When Harry Met Sally adage that “men and women can’t be friends.” Because “the sex part” (a.k.a. physical attraction) “always gets in the way.” Even post-Dawson’s Creek, shows that might have tried to undo the “damage” (regardless of it still being the truth) of this cliché—take, for example, Platonic—couldn’t genuinely convince viewers that, when it comes to friendship between a male and a female, things are always bound to get…prickly (even if it’s “just” for the other friends and lovers orbiting that friendship). This includes when said “platonic companion” is someone as hopelessly naïve—as utterly clueless—as Dawson. And yes, part of getting across that aura in a “male husk” was the deftness with which James Van Der Beek rendered this character. For, although Van Der Beek might not be associated with, let’s say, acting prowess—or any other character apart from Dawson Leery, really—it did take skill to portray this type of humanity in a teenage boy while still being convincing about it.

That Van Der Beek came to embody this character in the 90s, a time that, more than any other decade, seemed to understand that teenagers were actual human beings with a panoply of nuanced emotions, now seems like a cosmic confluence of events. And if anyone capitalized on that, it was Kevin Williamson, who saw something in Van Der Beek that Winnie Holzman and Marshall Herskovitz must have similarly seen in Claire Danes for the role of Angela Chase. In contrast to Angela, however, Dawson Leery has endured more pervasively in the collective consciousness (though Angela, too, ought to have an “ugly crying” meme).

Maybe one can chalk it up to him being a guy (ergo, the preferential treatment that goes with that)…or the fact that perhaps ever since, women have been hoping to find that kind of love in a sensitive but also “mail-order catalogue hot” friend. Dawson was, thus, a “sensible” fantasy that has become even more unrealistic in the present era of incels and teenage boys who have no idea how to tap into their feelings. So yeah, like him or not, Dawson forever.