How Dawson's Creek Revolutionized Teen Television

In an era where teen dramas are trite having become common place throughout the 2000s and 2010s, it's easy to forget that at one point in time a teen drama could revolutionize the television formula. But just about thirty years ago, when Dawson's Creek hit airwaves, a generation that couldn't find themselves represented in anything on television had finally been serviced. The biggest shows on broadcast television in 1998 were sitcoms about the adult experience in society, namely NBC's triple-headed monster of Friends, Fraser, and Seinfeld. There were procedurals, which have always been a television staple, namely E.R., Ally McBeal, and NYPD Blue, then you're breakthrough dramas that found ways to push the envelope in a traditional structure. See: The X-Files. Of course, children have content curated for them in any era as well. But that leaves a certain age, that time of adolescence where you're no longer a child, but not yet an adult, that may need something.

The 'young adults' demographic wanted something different that resonated with their unique experience during the unique time that was the 1990s. A post-Cold War, yet pre-9/11 fixation on what could be thanks to the advancements of technology and the rise of an internet age so new and pristine, yet still saturated and mixed with the alternative, bleakness of human expression that came with the rise of grunge, focus on the global conflict, and the rise of the the 24-hour news cycle that caused uncertainty wasn't reflected in televion content geared toward the nostalgia of the previous three decades. Outside of some subsections of the early-aughts, this is the last decade of true privacy and freedom that allowed teenagers to explore life, make their own mistakes, and basically trial-run adulthood without fear that a modicum of their insecurity would unravel because of something posted on the internet. In fact, the internet was still so new that the 'information superhighway' was its primary slang, if you needed any reminder of how people perceived and browsed the internet in a world where they needed their landline phone to connect. There is no generation before and after that can understand what it was to grow up in the '90s and '00s other than the generations that did so, and television tends to be years behind the trends. So, the first TV show that had its finger on the pulse was bound to carve out its own wildly successful niche that created locker-talk. Essentially, water-cooler talk for people who aren't yet standing by water-coolers. Television shows that would dominant those brief conversations had between boys wearing starter jackets and baggy jeans and girls sporting their choker necklaces and platform shoes on their way to the next class.

Dawson's Creek was the show that was able to find the generational voice in real time 1998. Everybody between the ages of 35 and 50 remembers everything, including the line just referenced that Pacey tells Joey during the Anti-Prom, because it was such a cultural phenomenon that found its way into the pantheon in large part due to how it captured the zeitgiest. Being able to walk a tightrope of balance between dramatic and witty is often difficult in television shows, especially those without the highest of budgets, but the levity found from both its creators and a cast with impeccable chemistry is how it found its humor in the everyday teenager experience. But it's also how each member of its cast represented a different part of the teenager experience.

Dawson Leery, performed by the late James Van Der Beek who passed away on Wednesday after a battle with colon cancer, is the main protagonist, and it worked because there's a sense of naivety and innocence that Van Der Beek was able to find within his role. Often a thankless character to play as an actor because the optimistic dreamer that believes in the good, and often allows his performative reality create a needlessly overbearing personality in a nuanced, tangible reality can become so annoying that it hurts the show. Everybody can relate to a character like Dawson but nobody would want to hang out with a character like Dawson. But at no point does Van Der Beek feel out of place or as if he's sinking those around him. In fact, Dawson's pity that's often made fun of was endearing because of how they leaned into it in the writer's room. Obviously, the showrunner is the same that created the Scream franchise, so tongue-in-cheek writing wasn't exactly frowned upon in the writer's room, but take the scene in season two where Dawson and Andie sing the blues.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXLdd4w50Q0

This scene alone tells you everything you need to know about how the show handles the Dawson character while perfectly explaining two of its other primary characters. Here, on his sixteenth birthday, Dawson is still unable to see beyond his superficial, kind of meaningless struggle. Meanwhile his best friend's girlfriend, a character he hadn't interacted much with up to that point, is dealing with the fallout of her brother's death, her other brother's coming out, and the fact that her mother is unable to confront reality about the passing of her child, all the while she deals with her own mental health struggles, without being able to rely on her father who couldn't cope and skipped town. The Andie character has everything crashing down around her, but she still tries to put up a facade for those around her, including Pacey, her boyfriend, who uses his wit to get through life as a cover for how much he's struggling. A fragile perfectionist, she had to be perfect because it was the only thing that her character could count on through real struggles a character like Dawson had never faced before.

This sort of exploration can be found in the character dynamics of everybody on the show. Michelle Williams, easily the breakout star of the show as the five-time Academy Award nominated actress went onto become one of the defining dramatic actresses of any generation, plays the role of Jen Lindly. This is the 'bad girl' of the show, when ultimately her character was that of a bad girl because of the dire situation she had found herself in due to her upbringing, including parents that didn't want her. Jen's story is that of tragedy who just wants to fit in and will do anything to fit in, even with people like her own grandmother or somebody like Joey, played by Katie Holmes, who constantly treats her like dirt under the guise of being nice and keeping the peace don't understand her or want to accept her. The story told between Jen and her grandmother after the fallout of the death of her grandfather is perhaps the best that the show had to offer, even if Jen's character was the most underwritten on the show. The story of Jen in general is one that not everybody can relate to, but most people can relate to the more centered story of Jen and her grandmother because most of us are very different people from our grandparents, and the generational divide can often create rifts. That's a very complex, but very common familial dynamic that's above the paygrade of most television shows, so it being done well makes for some of the most gripping television that the new millennium had to offer. It does help that Williams herself was the strongest actor on the show, so the harder character dynamics to be able to pull off emotionally were tied into her character, but her character also probably hit home with her experiences, considering she had been emancipated at fifteen from her parents. Each show has their breakout star that jumps into movies, and here it was Williams. But in real time, not everybody expected it to be.

The aforementioned Joey Potter. Where do we even begin? Joey Potter launched Katie Holmes as the it-girl of the network, the same network that had been hosting Sarah Michelle Gellar's Buffy. That's thanks in part to the everyday, common girl nature that the sincerity of Holmes brought to the role, but the Joey character is Dawson's best friend who lived down the creek. Joey is the definition of the girl-next-door, with a special authenticity brought to the table from Holmes. The character at the start of the show doesn't know what she wants because she doesn't know who she is, which ultimately leads to a lot of issues as her and Dawson grow up and start discovering themselves because Dawson thinks of life as a movie, which leaves little room for anything that isn't black and white. The Potter Family has their own struggles in the small town of Capside. Joey's father is in jail, her mother has passed, and her sister is trying to raise a baby while keeping a roof over Joey's head. Not only is there an innocence found in Joey, there's a real struggle that forces her to have to grow up. For her endgame Pacey, it's the exact opposite of Joey. Joey is ashamed of her family struggle, but Pacey ashamed of his family success, and that's where Pacey's struggle is found. He can't escape the shadow, so he has to learn not to give up on himself when everybody else has given up on him.

Then there's Jack, Andie's brother, who realizes his sexuality. This is in a time in the 1990s where being LGBT was met with far more scrutiny, forcing many members into the closet. Not only is Jack open about his sexuality, but he goes against stereotype, primarily to become the star football player for Capeside High.

Each of the six main nucleus of the Dawson's Creek cast represents a different struggle a teen may face, creating an eclectic group of outsiders where each character is so different that each person watching will resonate most with a different individual. Take each individual and their relatively low stakes, but consider how you were as a teenager, and suddenly those stakes are high, and the tension becomes high, and that's how Dawson's Creek found its stakes, making it a far more digestable watch than the average drama while still being enticing enough to continue coming back. This allowed a dynamic where the show could give life advice without sounding preaching, or as if they're trying to teach a lesson. That is where Dawson's Creek truly shines within its ensemble.

Every generation since Dawson's Creek has their teen dramas. For those in the 2000s, they had The Vampire Diaries and Gossip Girl, for those in the early 2010s, they had Pretty Little Liars and Teen Wolf, and in the late 2010s they had Riverdale. But that kind of show doesn't exist anymore in a streaming environment that's pushed by four-quadrant, algorithmic determined hits. The closest is HBO's Euphoria, but it's still far more prestige-television than the quippy teen show that would have its finger on the pulse of the teen struggle, and with the CW gearing itself more toward sports content with NXT, Nascar, and the PAC-12, it is no longer serving an audience that for the first time in thirty years finds itself under-served. On a day where the actor behind Dawson Leery leaves a significant impact as somebody who was at one point known in every classroom in America, perhaps television executives would be good to learn how they got there in the first place, especially with new struggles facing teenagers that have never been seen before, and thus never before covered on television. Every teenager feels like an outsider, and so did every character on Dawson's Creek, and that was its biggest claim to fame.

Dawson's Creek can currently be streamed on Netflix, Tubi, and Hulu.

Photo credits: Sony Pictures Television, Outerbanks Entertainment, and the CW.