“I don’t wanna wait / for our lives to be over…” was the cue on a Sunday morning to run, not walk, to the front room to collapse onto the sofa and tune in to T4. It was, of course, the iconic theme song – sung by Paula Cole – to Dawson’s Creek, and the week’s installment of the addictively angsty teen drama was just about to begin.
I was in the sixth form in high school – in central Norwich; sadly not a charming creek in the fictional Capeside, Massachusetts – when the series began in 1998 and the show’s popularity swept through the school quicker than a limited edition Impulse spray. It became a counterpart to my friends and my own coming-of-age experiences, the main characters accompanying us through to adulthood and into the real world, reflecting shared experiences. Although, arguably, it’s unlikely that cinephile Dawson Leery spent his Sundays at university hungover, drinking leftover Smirnoff Ice and eating beans on toast while having a cathartic cry to his favourite TV drama. Or maybe we were more alike than I knew?
At its heart were the main group of friends, aspiring filmmaker Dawson Leery (the late James Van Der Beek, who died of cancer, age 48, on Wednesday) a lad who suffered from main character syndrome before the term was even invented; loveable-but-confused tomboy Joey Potter (Katie Holmes) and, the dreamiest of dreamboat boyfriends, Pacey Witter (Joshua Jackson, in a role I fear ruined boyfriends for girls of a certain generation forever). There was the troubled Jen (Michelle Williams), who was tortured with maybe the saddest character arc of them all – I’ve still not recovered from her video diary to her daughter, Amy, in the 2003 finale – and in series two, siblings Andie (Meredith Monroe) and Jack McPhee (Kerr Smith) joined with their own set of unique traumas to mine.
All the characters were either coming to terms with harrowing events from their past, or dramas that were unfolding in their present lives or relationships. And while at first glance, the bucolic setting of small-town Americana where best friends clamber through each other’s bedroom windows (why did so many ‘90s TV characters do this?) to discuss their feelings isn’t exactly Euphoria; the show did cover many hard-hitting issues – rape, addiction, parental abuse, homophobia and mental health issues; at a time when talking about it was a taboo. In a predominantly pre-internet world, Dawson’s Creek was a great companion to magazines like Just 17 or Mizz to understanding personal issues that your teachers or parents may have been too embarrassed to explain.
This was a time before on-demand streaming and binge-watching to when linear series were told through – agonisingly! – weekly, terrestrial TV episodes. As the famous love triangle between Dawson, Joey and Pacey became even knottier, to have to wait a whole seven days before finding out the fall-out of a secret kiss forced us, like the characters, into experiencing the idea of yearning; of having to wait for our next emotional fix of our obsession.
This amorously-confused trio’s romance was the most glacial of slow burns; a complex and conflicted relationship that was given the space to fully develop over the six series. While our older siblings had Ross and Rachel’s will-they-won’t-they romance from Friends to obsess about; ours was which best friend Joey would eventually choose (spoiler: it was Pacey; it was always going to be Pacey, especially after that “I remember everything” line).
Although we all inhaled American TV in the late ‘90s, the canned-laughter of sitcoms like Blossom, Fresh Prince of Bel-Air or Saved By The Bell never quite cut as deep as Dawson’s Creek’s did. Like The O.C. after it, this felt like a drama specifically for young adults, that didn’t infantilise them or their issues. For every emo teen in the UK, struggling with our own micro-aggressions at school and at home, we felt seen.
Here were articulate, sophisticated American counterparts, who were navigating similar problems to us but who spoke in the most articulate – and yes, rather pretentiously verbose – of ways. Is this how real teenagers spoke; poetically, philosophically and with high emotional intelligence? No; but we wished we could. It felt grown up and aspirational, thanks to the creator, Kevin Williamson, like people our age were being trusted to carry the weight of the complex show, rather than deliver corny punchlines pulled together by a group of middle-aged people in a writers room.
But above all, Dawson’s Creek was one of the first TV shows I can remember watching that ultimately showed the importance of prioritising friendship above romance. As Dawson matured throughout the series, he came to the understanding of the almost spiritual connection between great friends. “It doesn’t matter who ends up with who,” Dawson tells Joey in the final episode. “In some unearthly way, it's always gonna be you and me…It's forever.” What a blueprint to be sent out into the world with in your early 20s, and what a fitting legacy to remember James Van Der Beek, the Millennials’ forever boy-next-door, by too.
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