An Ode to Dawson Leery

Daydream believer

I was flipping channels in my parents room the first time I saw Dawson’s Creek. I was probably 10 or 11? I was hooked immediately, fixated, by these beautiful, intellectual teenagers who were witty, and anxious, and odd. They were outcasts and they didn’t fit in, and that’s how I felt at my private school dominated by jocks and pretty, skinny girls who did ballet. I immediately loved the show. Hooked in seconds. I remember noting the time and channel. When I tuned in the next night at the same time, it wasn’t on. Panicked, I asked my babysitter at the time, a college girl I found impossibly pretty and cool, what show it was, and why it wasn’t on. She laughed and told me that it was only on once a week and it was called Dawson’s Creek. Thus began a lifelong love affair.

Dawson’s Creek was on Wednesdays, and I wrote “DC” on the family kitchen calendar in small letters every Wednesday even though I was the only one who watched it. My obsession with the show was an object of mockery for my brother, who like most big brothers, liked to mock the things their little sisters held sacred. That was sometimes enough to shame me out of liking something but not for this show. I used to tape episodes. When I rewatch episodes now, I remember rewinding them to watch Joey and Dawson kiss for the first time over and over again. It was the first piece of art I really loved. I rewatched episodes, I picked apart the teaser trailers, and the summer break felt interminable without the show. Whenever I am sad or stressed or overwhelmed, I can always come back to this show and feel good and safe.

Perhaps it’s because it was my first love affair with art (embarrassing that its not Tolstoy, I know!) but I was never concerned with bad writing or skeptical about a turn the show took. I still don’t look at it with a critical eye, and I have a bad habit of breaking down every piece of art into disparate pieces, but Dawson’s Creek transcends criticism. I was locked in for every single moment of the show. Joey was with Dawson? I ship. Pacey? That too! Random college guy? Absolutely. I was on the train. I am certainly biased, but I do think the show had truly compelling storylines. It had the first gay kiss on primetime television and Jack’s coming out storyline is so brave, sad, beautiful, brutal, and moving.

When I read reviews of people online criticizing the college seasons, I find myself compelled to defend it. It doesn’t matter that Joey moved on from Pacey so quickly, because that’s what people do when they go to college, they become someone else. They hurt people’s feelings. They don’t know how to be good people yet. That’s what the show is about. Muddling your way through adolescence.

Take Dawson. He is a hopelessly optimistic dreamer. He is also completely judgmental with a moral rigidity that doesn’t allow for anyone, from his girlfriends to his parents, to make mistakes. He is kind to his friends, always there for them, a good listener, but he also casts them as archetypes in the movie of his own life, and he gets pissed when people deviate from those archetypes by being human beings. He is childish and immature, but he’s also insightful and intelligent. He is selfish, and he is thoughtful. Every character in the show is like that. They are flawed, and messy, and act exactly like teenagers. Like humans.

That is so rare in television these days. In our post-Trump world, characters are all shades of either good or bad. I’m watching Industry right now, and everyone in that show is a different shade of selfish, greedy, and evil. The best you can hope for is somebody feels guilty about how selfish they are. The closest contemporary teen drama to Dawson’s is The Summer I Turned Pretty, and that show is basically a parable. Conrad is Good. Jeremiah is Evil. Belly is tempted by both, but ultimately chooses Good in the end. It’s a simple formulation that’s comforting to people. When people are either all good or all bad, you have the tools to deal with them. What’s hard to deal with is people who act unpredictably, who strain the bounds of our understanding, and challenge our ways of thinking. Most contemporary television shows are fairy tales meant to instruct us in how to classify people and navigate the world according to an (ironically) very Dawsonian rigid morality.

Not Dawson’s Creek! Even at its most preachy, it’s always complicated. When Jen finds out her boyfriend is homophobic, and condemns him for it, it doesn’t feel like a lecture. It feels like pain. You end up feeling empathy for everyone involved. The boyfriend was raised in a church to believe being gay was a sin, and this is the first time he’s really thought about it, and he’s confused, because he’s not sure if he agrees with the dogma that has thus far run his entire life. That’s big fucking shit! Jen understands that it’s complex but understandably doesn’t want to wait around for him to figure out how to be a basically decent person. A storyline like that in 2026 would end in a crucifixion. In Euphoria, the homophobic Bad person might get literally hit by a car. Yeah, that’s satisfying, but it isn’t what happens in the real world. Dawson’s Creek is all about the pain of growing up, learning, unlearning, dealing with hard shit, the bad people you can’t avoid, and the weird gray areas of life that are scary and difficult to confront.

As a young writer, Dawson’s story was too real. He was a filmmaker. He loved Spielberg. He was all about dreamy, big Hollywood flicks, and he was ambitious and relentlessly driven in his dream to become a director. Countless times in the series, a mentor-figure tells Dawson that his movies suck. Each time, he is sent spiraling into an existential crisis. Is he bad at the only thing he truly loves? In one season, he is told his film is derivative, and he tears down all his Spielberg posters and stares at his blank walls, the remnants of his innocent childhood in tatters on the floor. He takes up photography as a way to grow, evolve, and find his creativity again.

I honestly think it’s a little funny that people are always telling Dawson he sucks, but really, so much about being an artist is people telling you that you suck. No matter how successful you are, there is always an asshole around to tell you that your work is soulless, or derivative, or meaningless, and you have to learn to block out their voice, learn from it, and, most importantly, not let yourself get defeated by it. A lot of people take pleasure in making you feel small, especially when you’re creative. It fucking sucks. It is, no joke, the hardest part of my life having to constantly navigate people that are chomping at the bit to belittle me and tear apart my life’s work. Kate, is that a typo? Kate, people wouldn’t actually do the things they’re doing in your story! Kate, I think your protagonist may be a bad person! Everyone has something to say about this thing I poured my entire soul into. I have to believe that Dawson helped me develop the mettle to deal with the constant stream of rejection that comes with being an artist. When Dawson gets knocked down, he always picks himself up again and keeps making movies. Nobody treats him like a savant. Just like nobody will treat me like one. Haters will be haters. He is dedicated and hardworking and that’s how you become successful and sharp, not some mythical well of never-ending talent. Yeah, Dawson is self-centered, but you kind of have to be if you’re going to make art.

My friend and I always used to divide men into two categories: Dawson and Pacey. Dawson was always the self-involved asshole who would ghost you and fuck your sister if the opportunity arose, and Pacey the selfless perfect prince who would do anything to make you happy. That’s not quite true, though. If Dawson’s Creek taught me anything, there’s always more to it than that. People have 20 different sides to them and they grow and evolve every single day. Both Dawson and Pacey were self-involved assholes at one point or another, just like how all of us are, especially as teenagers. There is something comforting in that. We all fuck up, but that doesn’t make us bad. This idea that you can make a mistake and that it will be okay is powerful. The idea that people might forgive you when you fuck up? That’s something I have trouble with. I feel this need to be perfect, and I’m hard on myself all the time. I never let myself off the hook, and I think that when I do fuck up, it does say something permanent about me. In Dawson’s Creek, people are always fucking up and they’re always learning. The show offers a world that will not end when someone tells you that you are a stupid fucking filmmaker. You will live to make good art again.

I think that makes up for all the fucking batshit insane ideas the show gave me about sex, like that you had to spend years and years psychoanalyzing the mere idea of intercourse before you even thought about touching another person. That’s another topic for another essay. This essay is about hope, which is what Dawson is all about.

I know none of this specifically has to do with James Van Der Beek the person. It probably also reveals me as a psychotic person obsessed with a teen drama from 1998. I would perhaps die of embarrassment if the cast or creators of this show read this essay by a 36 year-old woman. All that is true, but sadly this program, and Dawson, as annoying as he can be, definitely shaped who I am now, and I think I’m a pretty okay person. James Van Der Beek was 21 when he played Dawson. He grew up in that role, while I grew up watching him play that role. Nobody could have played Dawson besides James. He had the perfect blend of humor and earnestness to make a Spielberg obsessed artsy weirdo in a small town charismatic and compelling. You never doubted why the girls in Capeside fell for Dawson. I’ve never really felt sad when a celebrity died. They’re celebrities, and enough of my actual loved ones have died to beat the saccharine impulse to showboat my grief out of me. That being said, I was fucking sad today.

RIP James Van Der Beek. You created a character that still surprises me. Dawson, you sucked, but you also ruled, I hated you, and I also loved you.