Creek Theses

New notes on Dawson’s Creek.

Cold Open
Because the dream of the nineties is still on life support in Portland (seriously, check our real-estate listings), yesterday I walked over to the independently owned brick-and-mortar music-and-video emporium near my house to buy a used copy of the Dawson’s Creek season 6 box set for $6. They had a second copy going for $8.50, which I assume meant it was in slightly better condition, but I’d decided beforehand that $6 was my price point. In fact, I’d come to this store a few times before and almost bought this particular box set, each time thinking, Am I really going to do this? And each time the answer had been no. It’s not no anymore.

Dawson’s Creek premiered in January 1998, and if you want more establishing detail than that, I suggest you Google it. I was fifteen at the time, halfway through tenth grade, and so not only part of the show’s prime demographic but the same age as its main characters. Granted, I lived in semi-suburban North Miami Beach, and they lived in small-town (would it be unreasonable to say semirural? It always felt that way to me) coastal Massachusetts, though the show was filmed in North Carolina, which is sometimes more and sometimes less obvious when you’re watching, but I don’t think any of this matters, at least in the context I’m planning to discuss the show today. 

I remember that right before Dawson’s Creek premiered there was an article in the Miami Herald profiling its creator, Kevin Williamson (we didn’t say “showrunner” yet), and that the article made bold claims to the effect that this show would provide special insight into teenage life as it was really lived today. I remember taking this very seriously and finding the prospect both terrifying and exhilarating. If the intent of the article was to stoke my interest in the show, it worked wonders, though if we’re talking about demographics, it must be said that most teenagers don’t typically read the arts section of the city paper, and so probably it—the article—was pitched toward my parents’ cohort, a fact lost on me at the time, not that things would have gone any differently if I’d known.

The show premiered. I watched it. And I was powerfully outraged at what I perceived to be its failure to live up to the high-realist standard promised in the article. We—that is, us teens—were not only misunderstood but misrepresented! That wasn’t us at all! And what if other people fell for the paper’s false claim and thought it was? I’m not sure if my credulity and subsequent indignation says more about the kind of kid I was or about the era itself, but it is obvious to me now, as I am sure it is to many of you, that the claim of exclusive insight into the avant-garde of adolescent life is never not being made, and that it is never not false. But why wouldn’t that be obvious now? I’m a thirty-four-year-old man who spent a decade in New York City knocking around the media and publishing industries, who has had many friends who were or are publicists, agents, marketing people, SEO ninjas, taste chasers, tastemakers, and so on. I’ve even had, when occasion called for it, publicists of my own. Moreover, aren’t we in the media industry now? My Twitter feed is open aswith a very specific and personal coming-of-age, not vis-à-vis puberty or high school but vis-à-vis public relations. What I mean is that I only ever thought the claim of its being “realistic” was “wrong” because I’d made the mistake of thinking that such a claim could or would or should be “right.”