TV Guilty Pleasures: Dawson's Creek

Middle school was a time of intentional nonconformity for me—the more people my age who liked any given cultural phenomenon, the more I rejected it. This applied to nothing more than the then-hugely popular Dawson’s Creek, which I spent much of my pre-adolescence ridiculing. After hearing about it all summer long at camp, I watched an episode for ironic reasons, mocking the whole way through. But as I found myself wiping away a decent amount of tears when Jen Lindley’s grandfather passed away, the truth as pretty obvious—I was hooked. For the next five years, my Wednesday nights were booked in advance. It’s incredibly embarrassing that the only reason I’ve ever seen The West Wing is because it aired directly after my weekly Dawson fix.

Everything about the show is great. I love that everyone remains friends in the face of mental breakdowns, cheating on each other, dating siblings, and coming out of the closet. I love the hilariously flawed parents and the legendary Dawson-Joey-Pacey triangle. I really love actor Oliver Hudson. And I love that somehow, the writers expect us to believe that Joey and Pacey spent three months on a boat together, alone, and never had sex.

Dawson’s Creek set the bar for future soap opera-esque, convoluted story lines. Every teen drama plot line that followed was merely a shell of Andie McPhee’s bipolarity, and any attempt to employ overblown language paled in comparison to Dawson’s vocabulary. Even in the later years of Pacey’s insider trading and Dawson’s tempestuous relationship with the starlet Natasha, I shamelessly analyzed the show every Thursday morning in English class with my classmates.

So, sure, I conformed in the most embarrassing way possible—by falling deeply, guiltily in love with Dawson’s Creek. But its five years of dramatic, comedic, and even absurdist plot lines and characters redefined the standards of television for me, and I guess sometimes that’s worth falling directly into a demographic for.