Jerry D

I’ve never felt as strongly about a show as I did Dawson’s Creek, and I’ll never be as involved with a show or a fandom again as I did with Dawson’s Creek and its fandom, for both good and bad. Dawson’s Creek was unique because it came along at a time when people really started to use the Internet as a way to talk about what they were watching, and, in fact, Fan Forum itself started as a website that hosted a Dawson’s Creek Website called Dawson’s Creek Daily, and it had one message board, the Dawson’s Creek board. I got my start here posting on the Dawson’s Creek board and later moderating it, and Fan Forum was very different then. We only had a couple hundred members in the early days of this website, and we’d have these incredible discussions about the show, and the producers of Dawson’s Creek even had their own website called “Dawson’s Desktop” where Dawson would post his thoughts and which followed the episodes, so the Internet became part of the experience of watching the show.

Dawson’s Creek started out as a well written show that tapped into the teenage zeitgeist in a unique way, and it was a show that really made you care about the characters. It was risqué for its time with some of the issues it tackled, like an Inter-Racial Couple, or a teacher having an affair with a student, or a girl with a troubled past trying to make a new life for herself, and it was also unique because it showed teenagers in a non-stereotypical fashion. It was also unique in the way it used a cinematic theme for every episode, much like the movie obsessed young man that it focused on, and each episode originally had a movie title in Season One.

Eventually though, the show became a badly written typical teenage soap opera as the seasons wore on, and it also became a caricature of itself, and I’ll always find that to be disappointing.