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Dawson’s Creek, Kevin Williamson, NC & Me

by Kathryn Margaret Rose

TV still from Dawson's Creek. Two teenage women and a teenage boy sit together at a cafeteria table.

“I reject reality,” says Dawson Leery in the pilot episode of Dawson’s Creek. It’s his response to the question “why movies?” posed by new girl Jen Lindley while touring his Spielberg-themed bedroom, and it’s an excellent introduction to his character. At 15 years old, Dawson is already disillusioned with his nearly perfect life, absorbed in ambition and nostalgic for a childhood he hasn’t fully left yet. With a wink from James Van Der Beek, Dawson divulges his Hollywood dreams to a sweet but skeptical outsider, and we taste the unearned confidence and self-deprecation that we’ll find in each of our Capeside High leads. It’s an attitude familiar to any American teenager, and one that well into adulthood I still can’t seem to shake.

Last year, during a period of unemployment, I watched all of Dawson’s Creek, something I’d never done despite the show’s significance to my generation. I’d been laid off during COVID, and was in my ninth year in New York where I was trying to be a writer, or performer, or maybe something else entirely. When I feel lost, I turn to nostalgia. I binge an old show and I call it research. Maybe this will give me my next great script idea, I think, or maybe it will just feel good.

"There’s hardly anything unfamiliar in those flat, swampy waterways, or in the naive aspiring artist and his group of brooding friends."

Created by screenwriter Kevin Williamson, the show was filmed in North Carolina as a semi-autobiographical take on his adolescent years in New Bern. I’m from North Carolina, too, and I remember the frenzy when filming began in Wilmington. I was 8 years old and the show’s mere existence was like evidence of life on other planets, proof that TV was made in the same universe as me. Williamson wanted to combine his two worlds, Hollywood and home, and at times it feels like he’s telling my story, too. There’s hardly anything unfamiliar in those flat, swampy waterways, or in the naive aspiring artist and his group of brooding friends.

This past winter, during the Omicron outbreak, I found myself unexpectedly in North Carolina for my longest visit in 10 years. I spent most of it hiking alone in the woods, flipping through brace-faced photo albums and struggling to outline my next pilot—this one about my own childhood. I had planned to write about myself as a form of catharsis, to understand myself by examining who I’d been. That turned out to be more challenging than expected. When writing a screenplay, you must know your characters inside and out, and now I wasn’t so sure. Who was my Dawson? Was she naive? Was she smart for her age? Was she spoiled? Delusional? Narcissistic? Had I been all of these things? Was I still? I had taken for granted something so fragile and the now courage to capture it was just out of reach.

I sulked in my writer’s block, attempting to retrace my steps down streets I once knew well, now lined with homes I didn’t recognize. The house where I’d spent my own teenage years had been sold seven years prior in a nasty divorce. The local mall where I’d bought my old GAP sweatshirt and my first pair of Converse was being torn down. My town smelled the same, pine trees and cut grass, but any tangible evidence of my presence was now packed in boxes in my mom’s new garage. When you’re young and leave home, you assume it will always be there, waiting for you to return. That the memories will be preserved like fossils in amber just beneath the surface. Apparently, sometimes you have to dig.

A month went by. Then two. Still nothing. I was lost in a story within a story, trying to understand the beginning before reaching the end. And it just wasn’t coming together. With an unfinished script, I returned to New York feeling sentimental, frustrated, and a little self-absorbed. Like Kevin Williamson and Dawson Leery and teenagers everywhere, I still feel the urge to immortalize the same place I once longed to escape. And I guess I’ll continue to try.

In “Coming Home,” the first episode of season 4, forbidden lovers Pacey and Joey are returning from their summer away on a boat trip. Anchored offshore, they look out at the Capeside coastline where the loose ends of last season await them. 

“Just what would we be missing from the land of poorly scripted melodramas, huh?” Pacey asks, toying with the idea of shirking it all and sailing away again. “Recycled plot lines, tiresome self-realizations?”

Williamson had already left the show, but this cheeky call-out is characteristic of his writing style. Pacey is echoing what critics had been saying about Dawson’s and the teen drama genre in general—that it was trite, overdone, unrealistic, cloying, and exhausting. Season 4 premiered in October 2000, and older audiences had grown tired of the moody teen tropes introduced ten years earlier on Beverly Hills 90210 and which arguably peaked with My So-Called Life in ‘94. The Dawson’s style was so prolific and therefore subject to such ridicule that it was even parodied on Nickelodeon’s The Amanda Show in a sketch called Moody’s Point—the implication being that such earnest teen themes even looked ridiculous to 10 and 11-year-olds.

TV still from Dawson's Creek. A teenage girl and boy lie on a bed chatting, the boy holding a remote controller.

But Dawson’s Creek wasn’t a stupid show, and when Pacey, the show’s most tortured and cynical character, delivers these lines, they’re about more than just critics in the undertones and angry best friends in the overtones. In this moment, half-serious as it may be, he’s talking about life itself; about the efforts of young people and adults trying to make something of themselves. The American Dream: trite, overdone, unrealistic, cloying and exhausting.

“You throw in the occasional downward spiral of a dear friend and maybe a baby here and a death there, and all you've really got is a recipe for some soul-sucking, mind-numbing ennui,” Pacey continues in his half-hearted attempt to whisk Joey away. “I, for one, can skip it.”

Of course, they don’t skip it. Pacey and Joey return to Capeside to reunite with their families and confront Dawson, and whatever your opinion of the college years, the show goes on for three more successful seasons (my official review of 5 and 6 is “thank god for Busy Phillips” and I’ll just leave it at that). The genre doesn’t die either; from the spawn of Dawson’s we get Gilmore Girls, The O.C., Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars, and North Carolina’s other bundle of joy One Tree Hill. Kevin Williamson’s career finds footing again with The Vampire Diaries and the reboots of his imitable classics Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer into their own TV dramas.

"The American Dream: trite, overdone, unrealistic, cloying and exhausting."

Williamson’s work has always been shameless in its campy self-reference and use of clichés. He pulls them apart and polishes them to expose the value they still possess, often to have them lampooned in spite of their own self-awareness. But teen dramas, hackneyed as they may be, have yet to lose their gleam to their target audience. Repackaged and resold to a new generation the message remains the same that there is comfort in the dramatic, the hopeful, and the all-too-relatable. If you suspend your disbelief just the slightest bit, you can escape to a fantasy life not all that different from your own. It’s why I’ll keep writing my own story, no matter how lost I become. I’ll keep digging and sifting and cutting and pasting until I’ve finally created the thing I need most, the thing we’re all looking for, really: something that feels like home. 

Last year, during a period of unemployment, I watched all of Dawson’s Creek, something I’d never done despite the show’s significance to my generation. I’d been laid off during COVID, and was in my ninth year in New York where I was trying to be a writer, or performer, or maybe something else entirely. When I feel lost, I turn to nostalgia. I binge an old show and I call it research. Maybe this will give me my next great script idea, I think, or maybe it will just feel good.

"There’s hardly anything unfamiliar in those flat, swampy waterways, or in the naive aspiring artist and his group of brooding friends."

Created by screenwriter Kevin Williamson, the show was filmed in North Carolina as a semi-autobiographical take on his adolescent years in New Bern. I’m from North Carolina, too, and I remember the frenzy when filming began in Wilmington. I was 8 years old and the show’s mere existence was like evidence of life on other planets, proof that TV was made in the same universe as me. Williamson wanted to combine his two worlds, Hollywood and home, and at times it feels like he’s telling my story, too. There’s hardly anything unfamiliar in those flat, swampy waterways, or in the naive aspiring artist and his group of brooding friends.

This past winter, during the Omicron outbreak, I found myself unexpectedly in North Carolina for my longest visit in 10 years. I spent most of it hiking alone in the woods, flipping through brace-faced photo albums and struggling to outline my next pilot—this one about my own childhood. I had planned to write about myself as a form of catharsis, to understand myself by examining who I’d been. That turned out to be more challenging than expected. When writing a screenplay, you must know your characters inside and out, and now I wasn’t so sure. Who was my Dawson? Was she naive? Was she smart for her age? Was she spoiled? Delusional? Narcissistic? Had I been all of these things? Was I still? I had taken for granted something so fragile and the now courage to capture it was just out of reach.

I sulked in my writer’s block, attempting to retrace my steps down streets I once knew well, now lined with homes I didn’t recognize. The house where I’d spent my own teenage years had been sold seven years prior in a nasty divorce. The local mall where I’d bought my old GAP sweatshirt and my first pair of Converse was being torn down. My town smelled the same, pine trees and cut grass, but any tangible evidence of my presence was now packed in boxes in my mom’s new garage. When you’re young and leave home, you assume it will always be there, waiting for you to return. That the memories will be preserved like fossils in amber just beneath the surface. Apparently, sometimes you have to dig.

A month went by. Then two. Still nothing. I was lost in a story within a story, trying to understand the beginning before reaching the end. And it just wasn’t coming together. With an unfinished script, I returned to New York feeling sentimental, frustrated, and a little self-absorbed. Like Kevin Williamson and Dawson Leery and teenagers everywhere, I still feel the urge to immortalize the same place I once longed to escape. And I guess I’ll continue to try.

In “Coming Home,” the first episode of season 4, forbidden lovers Pacey and Joey are returning from their summer away on a boat trip. Anchored offshore, they look out at the Capeside coastline where the loose ends of last season await them. 

“Just what would we be missing from the land of poorly scripted melodramas, huh?” Pacey asks, toying with the idea of shirking it all and sailing away again. “Recycled plot lines, tiresome self-realizations?”

Williamson had already left the show, but this cheeky call-out is characteristic of his writing style. Pacey is echoing what critics had been saying about Dawson’s and the teen drama genre in general—that it was trite, overdone, unrealistic, cloying, and exhausting. Season 4 premiered in October 2000, and older audiences had grown tired of the moody teen tropes introduced ten years earlier on Beverly Hills 90210 and which arguably peaked with My So-Called Life in ‘94. The Dawson’s style was so prolific and therefore subject to such ridicule that it was even parodied on Nickelodeon’s The Amanda Show in a sketch called Moody’s Point—the implication being that such earnest teen themes even looked ridiculous to 10 and 11-year-olds.

TV still from Dawson's Creek. A teenage girl and boy lie on a bed chatting, the boy holding a remote controller.

But Dawson’s Creek wasn’t a stupid show, and when Pacey, the show’s most tortured and cynical character, delivers these lines, they’re about more than just critics in the undertones and angry best friends in the overtones. In this moment, half-serious as it may be, he’s talking about life itself; about the efforts of young people and adults trying to make something of themselves. The American Dream: trite, overdone, unrealistic, cloying and exhausting.

“You throw in the occasional downward spiral of a dear friend and maybe a baby here and a death there, and all you've really got is a recipe for some soul-sucking, mind-numbing ennui,” Pacey continues in his half-hearted attempt to whisk Joey away. “I, for one, can skip it.”

Of course, they don’t skip it. Pacey and Joey return to Capeside to reunite with their families and confront Dawson, and whatever your opinion of the college years, the show goes on for three more successful seasons (my official review of 5 and 6 is “thank god for Busy Phillips” and I’ll just leave it at that). The genre doesn’t die either; from the spawn of Dawson’s we get Gilmore Girls, The O.C., Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars, and North Carolina’s other bundle of joy One Tree Hill. Kevin Williamson’s career finds footing again with The Vampire Diaries and the reboots of his imitable classics Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer into their own TV dramas.

"The American Dream: trite, overdone, unrealistic, cloying and exhausting."

Williamson’s work has always been shameless in its campy self-reference and use of clichés. He pulls them apart and polishes them to expose the value they still possess, often to have them lampooned in spite of their own self-awareness. But teen dramas, hackneyed as they may be, have yet to lose their gleam to their target audience. Repackaged and resold to a new generation the message remains the same that there is comfort in the dramatic, the hopeful, and the all-too-relatable. If you suspend your disbelief just the slightest bit, you can escape to a fantasy life not all that different from your own. It’s why I’ll keep writing my own story, no matter how lost I become. I’ll keep digging and sifting and cutting and pasting until I’ve finally created the thing I need most, the thing we’re all looking for, really: something that feels like home.