How Dawson’s Creek taught a generation of ’90s teens to love… and showed boys it was OK to cry

When news broke that actor James Van Der Beek had died, a television executive in Los Angeles texted me: “Dawson’s Creek was the show where everybody spoke the way I wished I had spoken in high school,” she said.

Of course, nobody in real life spoke like the kids from Dawson’s Creek. Or indeed the kids from My So-Called Life or Felicity, or any of the shows that make up the cultural pantheon of required television viewing in the world of 1990s-era teenagers.

But such is the power of television that audiences, and devoted fans steeped so deeply into the fiction, that for them – well, for us – fictional characters such as Dawson Leery, Joey Potter, Pacey Witter and Jen Lindley are elevated from mere words that Kevin Williamson has typed onto a page, into living, breathing friends.

James Van Der Beek was born in Cheshire, Connecticut, in 1977. He was the son of a dancer and gymnastics teacher, and a former minor league baseball pitcher. Whatever he was destined to be, he was clearly no ordinary kid.

His high school life reads like it was writ large from the script of a Glee episode: he starred in his middle school production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, and at 16, he made his professional debut off-Broadway in the New York premiere of Edward Albee’s play Finding the Sun.

But in 1997, he was transformed by the power of television into Dawson Leery, and achieved a strange, immortal sort of fame. Like Ron Howard’s Richie Cunningham, or Jason Priestley and Shannon Doherty’s Brandon and Brenda Walsh, the actor and the character became inextricably linked.

Dawson was by no measure the first TV pin-up boy, but he was perhaps the first who embodied a softer kind of masculinity. Dawson was sensitive and thoughtful. He didn’t always get it right, but he was at pains to understand other people, and ultimately, to understand himself.

In one of the most memorable scenes in the show’s history, Dawson broke down in tears. The scene was pivotal in teaching a young generation of boys and girls that boys could express their emotions, and indeed cry openly, without having their masculinity challenged.

In the show’s season 3 finale – titled True Love – the audience was finally given a resolution, of sorts, to the love triangle that had developed between Dawson (James Van Der Beek), his lifelong best friend Joey (Katie Holmes) and his best friend from school Pacey (Joshua Jackson).

You see, Pacey loved Joey, and Joey loved Pacey, but Dawson – Joey’s soulmate, of a sort – was torn apart inside because he had slowly come to the realisation that he, too, loved Joey. When Dawson told Joey to go after Pacey, he set her free, but a moment, when he was alone, he broke down in tears.

The camera’s close-up of Dawson’s face, as the tears began to flow, would go on to become an internet meme. It would haunt Van Der Beek almost as much as the character of Dawson himself. And the ironic twist to the tale? It wasn’t even in the script, Van Der Beek later revealed.

“It was appropriate for the scene,” he later said. “It was just high drama, you’ve been living with this character for a while and a scene like that just kind of drops in your lap and you just lose it. They yell, ‘Cut’ and say, ‘Oh my god, that was amazing’. I remember being completely surprised by it because it was completely sincere. The fact that it’s being used to mock me now, I think it’s so funny.”

The cultural significance of Dawson’s Creek was, of course, not confined only to Van Der Beek’s success. It turned actors Joshua Jackson, Katie Holmes and Michelle Williams into household names. It created a new kind of authentic visibility for LGBTQI+ teenagers, and gave characters Jack McPhee (Kerr Smith) and Ethan Brody (Adam Kaufman) American TV’s first passionate gay kiss.

Likewise, it was also part of a wider cultural moment. The Warner Bros-owned TV network The WB, which aired Dawson’s Creek, transformed the studio’s brand from old and safe to young and edgy. It was no coincidence the network’s 1990s program slate also included Charmed, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel and Felicity.

But what made Dawson’s Creek endure in the culture was the connective tissue it knitted between itself and its audience. To say we watch television programs and see some kind of reflection of ourselves in them can seem cheesy and superficial. I mean, like most TV people, these people don’t even talk like real people talk.

And yet, there was in this series, and in particular its pilot episode, which was hailed at the time as one of the best TV pilots of all time, something that sprang from a well of authenticity. The dialogue may have been overheated, but the tonal notes and the characters had a sense of reality about them that was engaging and captivating.

The series would go on to run for 128 hour-long episodes across six seasons, back in an era where a television season was neither short-order nor was it dropped in a pile of episodes all at once.

That pre-streaming stream, where we made appointments with TV characters, and checked in with them weekly, likely explains why now, almost three decades later, we are having a conversation about the enduring legacy of a character who might otherwise have been a speck of sand on TV’s beach. Will we do the same for the great characters of the streaming era? Likely not.

In the real world, Van Der Beek went from sappy son to happy father. He and his wife, Kimberly, have six children: Olivia, Joshua, Annabel, Emilia, Gwendolyn and Jeremiah. He described fatherhood as “the most treasured honour of my life” and crediting his children with “re-teaching me how to live, laugh, love, and show up in my own life and in the world”.

In 2020, they left Hollywood behind and moved to a sprawling property in Texas. “We wanted to give them space and we wanted them to live in nature,” he said at the time.

But on television, where nobody ages, Dawson Leery remains forever a teenager. And our collective memory of him endures in popular culture. In part, because of Kevin Williamson’s great writing, but also because of Van Der Beek’s guileless, almost virtuous, charm, which gave Dawson a living, breathing, three-dimensional existence.

What was key to understanding this young man, with his complicated grown-up thoughts, and his occasional tears, is that he never stopped being a very cool guy, and a pragmatist, even if he was also a softie at heart. “Like all great romantics, Shakespeare realised love was a lot more likely to end with a bunch of dead Danish people than with a kiss,” he once said.

But when it came to something more enduring, he understood the nature and power of real connection. A soulmate, he once told Joey, was “the one person in the world that knows you better than anyone else … someone who you carry with you forever”.

In the annals of television history, he could just as easily have been talking about himself.

Dawson’s Creek is now streaming on Stan, which is owned by Nine, the publisher of this masthead.

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