Jerry D

Well, I don’t know why Williamson walked away from The Vampire Diaries, but with Dawson’s Creek, I think that he and everyone involved never expected the show to go beyond Season One, because it was a Mid-Season Replacement Show with a limited number of episodes on a fledgling network, so that’s why Season One played out like a Mini-Series, with a beginning, a middle, and an end where Dawson realizes that he’s in love with Joey and he kisses her. Once the show became tremendously popular and it was renewed, they didn’t know what to do, so they broke up Dawson and Joey and brought in Jack and Andie as love interests for Joey and Pacey, because I guess they felt that keeping Dawson and Joey together as a couple would make them boring, but once they broke them up as a couple, they also destroyed their friendship, which was what everyone had loved about them, and the show was never the same after that. Williamson’s involvement in the show was minimal in Season Two, and he left the show entirely after Season Two, and the show suffered for it.

In hindsight, they shouldn’t have gotten Dawson and Joey together so early in the Series run, because they had nowhere to go but down after that. They should have kept them as friends and allowed them to date other people, but have them realize in the final season that they were meant to be together. Instead, like you said, the writers and producers cynically strung along the Dawson and Joey fans with all the “soulmate” talk and giving them a nice scene together here and there to show they still had a connection, but in the end, the Dawson and Joey fans got nothing but a phony “soulmate” declaration between them, which ultimately meant nothing because they became the antithesis of “soulmates,” and she ended up with Pacey.