“Shall we all go for a walk?” my mother suggested, one hot July day in 1999. We were on our annual family summer holiday in Cornwall, and that year, my friend Issy had come along, too. She and I reacted with genuine horror. A walk? Right now? No, thank you—our favorite TV show, Dawson’s Creek, was about to start. We’d sit inside with the curtains drawn, like any sensible 15-year-olds, and see everyone later.
Dawson’s Creek, which followed the highs and lows of a group of teens in the fictional New England town of Capeside, was my generation’s adolescence. The series finale in 2003 was watched by 7.5 million of us. So there’s a reason that the sad death of James Van Der Beek—better known as the show’s lead character, Dawson Leery—at just 48, from colorectal cancer, has hit millennials hard.
For us, the opening credits are as memorable as footage of the cast of Friends frolicking in that fountain. Pacey Witter (played by Joshua Jackson) falling down in the sand, Jen (Michelle Williams) leaning against a tree, Dawson and Joey Potter (Katie Holmes) dancing underneath the pier. The familiar refrain from Paula Cole’s theme song—“I don’t want to wait for our lives to be over”—feels especially poignant now.
We lapped it up; it was unmissable appointment television. And we had to wait literal months for new episodes every time a season ended, with nothing else to fill the void—almost unthinkable now.
I was 14 when Dawson’s Creek first aired in the UK and 19 when it ended, so it’s no exaggeration to say that this group of terrifyingly eloquent teenagers provided my blueprint for how to grow up. My God, the angst was real, wasn’t it? The love triangle between childhood friends Dawson and Joey and his bad boy (or what passed for one in Capeside; Euphoria, this was not) best pal Pacey was central to the entire show, and dragged out over all six seasons.
The turbulent friendships, endless fallings out, the yearning and romantic yo-yoing. The promise of sex hanging in the air. The message I received was that love was rarely straightforward, losing your virginity was the thing around which the entire world revolved, and that someone was always going to end up getting hurt. Usually Dawson.
I have no doubt that the adolescent intensity, jealousy, betrayals, moralizing, and slut-shaming (poor Jen) shaped much of my own young life. These were the teenagers we most admired and wanted to be—grown-up, emotionally switched-on, grandiose versions of ourselves, with a pier to hang out at on sunny afternoons. Sign me up! When a male friend climbed through my bedroom window in my first year of university, I thought it was the coolest thing in the world. Looking back, I’ve just realized that he might have meant it as a romantic gesture. Whoops.
Like most teenage girls I knew, I desperately wanted to be Joey Potter—the girl-next-door with whom everyone fell hopelessly in love. And like pretty much everyone else, I was Team Pacey—the handsome class clown who was clearly a good kisser (very important in 1999), and uttered the ultimate knee-trembling line, “I remember everything,” while dancing with Joey at prom in Season 3. Butterflies, even now.
The character of Dawson was, let’s be honest, a bit of a pain. Van Der Beek played that toxic nice guy to perfection—the chivalrous romantic who’s oh-so nice to women but angry, judgemental, and entitled when they reject him. The “ugly crying” moment, when he tells Joey to walk away and pursue her relationship with Pacey, became a meme in recent years for good reason—and the actor later joked that even he wouldn’t have wanted to be Dawson’s friend in real life. Yet we loved him, too—this slightly dull, earnest, Spielberg nerd and aspiring filmmaker. Was it a coincidence that my first boyfriend had floppy blonde hair? I think not.