Dawson's Creek is an American teen drama television series about the lives of a close-knit group of friends in the fictional town of Capeside, Massachusetts, beginning in high school and continuing into college. It aired from January 20, 1998, to May 14, 2003, for six seasons. The series started out starring James Van Der Beek as Dawson Leery; Katie Holmes as his best friend and love interest, Joey Potter; Joshua Jackson as their friend Pacey Witter; and Michelle Williams as Jen Lindley, a New York City arrival to Capeside.
The show was created by Kevin Williamson and premiered on The WB as a mid-season replacement. It was produced by Columbia TriStar Television, renamed Sony Pictures Television before the final season, and was filmed in Wilmington, North Carolina.
Along with Buffy the Vampire Slayer and 7th Heaven, Dawson's Creek became one of the flagship shows for The WB and launched its main cast to international stardom. The show placed at No. 90 on Entertainment Weekly's "New TV Classics" list in 2007. It has also been credited with kicking off a boom of teen-centered shows in the late 1990s that continued into the 2000s.
Premise
Dawson Leery is an introspective 15-year-old aspiring filmmaker in the small New England town of Capeside, Massachusetts. Since childhood, he has been best friends with Josephine "Joey" Potter, who routinely comes over to his house through a ladder into his bedroom for movie-watching and platonic sleepovers. Tomboy Joey, who lost her mother to cancer and whose father is in prison for drug trafficking, lives with her older sister Bessie, who runs the restaurant The Icehouse.
Dawson works at a video rental store with his other best friend Pacey Witter, an underachieving class clown who occasionally squabbles with Joey. Dawson and Joey dance around a growing attraction to each other, but their dynamic shifts with the arrival of Jen Lindley, who has moved to Capeside from New York City to live with her grandparents. The series explores the characters' coming-of-age, dealing with topics such as first love, death, coming out, homophobia, class differences, racism, drug and alcohol addiction, depression, teenage pregnancy, abortion, consent, abuse, mental health, and divorce.
Series overview
Episodes
Season 1 (1998)
The first season covers a love triangle between Dawson, Joey, and Jen, which some critics have compared to the love triangle between Archie Comics characters Archie, Betty, and Veronica. Some episodes feature homages to movies such as The Breakfast Club and some reference Kevin Williamson's work on Scream. Jen's reasons for moving to Capeside are revealed – she was acting "too sexual" as a result of being raped by an older man who got her drunk when she was just twelve. Pacey aims to lose his virginity and has an affair with a new teacher at Capeside High School. Dawson must cope with the news his mother Gail has had an affair, and then witness his parents' attempts to recover from this.
Season 2 (1998–1999)
The second season takes place during the characters' second half of their sophomore year. Siblings Andie and Jack McPhee move to Capeside and enroll at the high school. The type-A achiever Andie becomes romantically involved with Pacey and helps him to become more motivated. It is revealed that her older brother has died but her mother sometimes acts as if he is still alive. Andie seems to be responsible for caring for her and protecting her at such times, as her father is absent. Pacey becomes a rock for Andie as it is revealed she struggles with mental illness herself. Joey finds herself drawn to Jack, who initially reciprocates her feelings, but comes to realize he is gay, which puts him at odds with homophobic classmates and an intolerant father. Jen befriends "bad girl" Abby Morgan and goes down a path of self-destruction. Dawson must deal with the divorce of his parents, Mitch and Gail.
Season 3 (1999–2000)
The third season saw the beginning of the characters' junior year and a blossoming romance between Joey and Pacey. When Dawson discovers his two friends have become a couple behind his back, he is dejected and angry. Dawson and Pacey become rivals for Joey's affection. Joey tries to repair her friendship with Dawson, but at the end of the season, Dawson realizes he does not want to hold Joey back, so he urges her to go and join Pacey, who is sailing down the coast for the summer. Jen is pursued by freshman football player Henry Parker and initially finds him immature but grows to return his feelings. Jack tries to find his first gay experience, while also juggling football and trying to find a new place to live after his father sells the only home he knows.
Season 4 (2000–2001)
The fourth season takes place during the characters' senior year of high school and deals with Joey and Pacey's ups and downs as a couple. Their relationship is tested by differing post-high school plans, Joey's friendship with Dawson, and Pacey's insecurity. Jen learns that Henry wants to break up with her but he does not say this to her face. Andie almost dies at a rave when she takes ecstasy that was in Jen's possession via a new boy, Drue, whom Jen used to know in New York. The drug conflicts with Andie's prescribed medication. The incident fractures Jen's friendship with Jack and the group. Dawson starts to date Gretchen, Pacey's older sister who has moved back to Capeside.
Season 5 (2001–2002)
The fifth season follows most of the characters leaving Capeside to begin new lives in big cities. In Los Angeles, Dawson attends film school at the University of Southern California but starts to have second thoughts. After arguing with his parents over dropping out, his father dies, leaving Dawson more confused about his future. In Boston, Joey, Jack and Jen navigate their freshman year of college at the fictional institutions, Worthington University and Boston Bay College. Pacey finds himself adrift after working on a yacht all summer but enters the restaurant business when he takes a job as a cook at a trendy restaurant in Boston. Jack joins a fraternity and embraces life as an openly gay college student, but it puts his relationship with his boyfriend Tobey under strain. Joey struggles to adjust to life as a college student but makes a new friend. Jen finds herself drawn into a whirlwind relationship and also supports Dawson when he attends grief counseling.
Season 6 (2002–2003)
In the sixth and final season, Dawson moves to Boston and begins to work on a low-budget film project that echoes his life in Capeside. Jen must deal with her parents' impending divorce, while Jack faces sexual harassment from a professor. Joey clashes throughout the season with an egotistical writing professor. Pacey embarks on a new career which comes as a surprise to everyone when he takes a job as a stock broker in a small brokerage firm in Boston. The two-part finale, which is set in the year 2008, finds everyone reunited in Capeside for a special wedding, but the happy reunion is cut short after the group learns that one of their own has been harboring a heartbreaking secret. In the midst of the tragedy, old scores are settled, new relationships blossom, and new ventures are chosen for a better future.
Cast and characters
James Van Der Beek as Dawson Leery, the titular character of the show. An introspective dreamer, he aspires to be a filmmaker just like his hero Steven Spielberg. Throughout the series he has romantic relationships with his childhood friend Joey and his neighbor Jen.
Michelle Williams as Jen Lindley, a rich girl from New York who was exiled to Capeside by her parents to live with her grandparents in the house next door to Dawson's. She was sexually abused at 12 and has since had a wild girl reputation which she resents. Often sarcastic.
Joshua Jackson as Pacey Witter, Dawson's wisecracking best friend who is seen as an underachiever by his toxic and abusive family. Apparently light-hearted, Pacey has a hidden sad and romantic side.
Katie Holmes as Joey Potter, Dawson's best friend. A tomboy, Joey often serves as a realistic voice of reason to the more idealistic Dawson but she can also be suspicious and has a short temper.
Mary-Margaret Humes as Gail Leery (seasons 1–4; recurring seasons 5–6), Dawson's mother. She works as an anchorwoman at the Capeside news station, later leaving journalism to start the restaurant Leery's Fresh Fish.
John Wesley Shipp as Mitchell "Mitch" Leery (seasons 1–4; guest season 5), Dawson's father and Gail's on-and-off-again husband. He is initially unemployed but then starts working at Capeside High School as a substitute teacher, guidance counselor, and football coach. He later becomes the co-owner of Leery's Fresh Fish.
Mary Beth Peil as Evelyn "Grams" Ryan, Jen's grandmother. Her conservative personality initially puts her at odds with Jen, but she comes to form a close bond with her granddaughter and opens her home to Jack when he needs a place to stay.
Nina Repeta as Bessie Potter (seasons 1–4; recurring seasons 5–6), Joey's older sister. She has helped raise Joey after the loss of their mother to cancer and their father to prison. She runs the Potter family-owned Icehouse restaurant and later opens up a bed-and-breakfast with Joey.
Kerr Smith as Jack McPhee (seasons 3–6; recurring season 2), Andie's brother and Jen's best friend. As a high school student, he struggles with his sexuality and ultimately comes out as gay.
Meredith Monroe as Andrea "Andie" McPhee (seasons 3–4; recurring season 2; guest season 6), Jack's sister who befriends and becomes involved with Pacey. Outwardly, she is an achiever at school but also struggles with mental illness which developed after the death of her older brother Tim.
Busy Philipps as Audrey Liddell (season 6; recurring season 5), Joey's roommate at Worthington University. She becomes a part of the main characters' friendship group and has a brief relationship with Pacey.
Production
Conception
Following the selling of his spec script for Wes Craven-directed Scream (1996), film assistant Kevin Williamson was taking several meetings with film and television producers before the slasher film began production. In what would be his first television meeting, Williamson met executive Paul Stupin; when asked if he had ideas for a television production, Williamson came up with the idea of a teen series based on his youth growing up near a North Carolina creek as an aspiring filmmaker who admired director Steven Spielberg.
Stupin liked his idea and asked him to come back the next day and pitch it to Columbia TriStar Television, prompting Williamson to write a 20-page outline for Dawson's Creek that night. Williamson pitched the show "as Some Kind of Wonderful, meets Pump Up the Volume, meets James at 15, meets My So-Called Life, meets Little House on the Prairie", also taking inspiration from teen drama Beverly Hills, 90210 as he "wanted it to speak to the teenage audience of the day".
When Columbia TriStar Television requested him to relocate the show to Boston, Massachusetts, he settled with fictional Capeside, and pitched it to Fox. However, commissioned amid the struggling of Party of Five, Fox wondered if they needed another teen drama, and while they were supportive of Williamson's scripts, they eventually passed on it. Left unused, Columbia TriStar Television sent his scripts to newly founded The WB network, which was looking for fresh programming ideas after launching the supernatural drama series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Williamson went for a meeting with then-chief programmer Garth Ancier and entertainment president Susanne Daniels, who loved his script and picked it up for The WB's new Tuesday night lineup. Procter & Gamble Productions joined in as an original co-producer of the series, but sold its interest in the show three months before the premiere when printed stories surfaced about the racy dialogue and risqué plot lines.
Casting
Dawson's Creek would become responsible for launching the acting careers of its young lead stars James Van Der Beek, Michelle Williams, Katie Holmes, and Joshua Jackson, who had varying levels of acting experience prior to being cast in the show. Known for his appearance in The Mighty Ducks series, playing a young and aspiring hockey player, Jackson was initially considered for the main role of Dawson Leery. However, while Williamson "fell in love" with Jackson, citing his ability to read any role during the auditions, he felt that Jackson's good looks would not fit the underdog, nerd, and video geek character he envisioned for the show's titular character.
After The WB expressed their wish to look for a different actor, Williamson decided on casting him in the role of Dawson's best friend Pacey Witter instead. After watching a video of James Van Der Beek that his casting director had sent in, the casting crew invited him to audition in Los Angeles. A regular off-Broadway performer, Van Der Beek impressed Williamson with his "cerebral and internal" quality, citing "that nervousness that made it seem like he was pre-thinking and over-thinking and over-compensating constantly like he was insecure. And we said, "There's Dawson"." Actors Charlie Hunnam, Adrian Grenier, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, and Scott Speedman also auditioned for the role of Dawson, while Adam Brody read for Pacey. Josh Hartnett also auditioned for a role.
With the role of Dawson's best female friend Joey Potter, casting directors were looking for a tomboy character. Williamson and his team were initially close to casting actress Selma Blair in the role who had auditioned "very tough, [but] with a lot of heart," when an audition tape of Katie Holmes came in, in which she had filmed herself in her basement, with her mother reading Dawson's lines. Williamson thought she had exactly the right look for Joey, citing that "she had those eyes, those eyes just stained with loneliness." He asked her to come to California, but a conflict with her school play schedule prevented her from doing so. Upon her arrival in Los Angeles two weeks later, she was able to secure the role.
Michelle Williams, who had acted in Lassie, Species, and in guest spots on TV sitcoms, impressed Williamson when she auditioned with a heartfelt scene in which her character Jen Lindley goes in and sees her grandfather lying in the bed, transforming herself "into this broken child who just needed to be fixed". Katherine Heigl also was one of the actresses who auditioned for the role of Jen after Steve Miner, who directed the show's pilot and Heigl's 1994 film My Father the Hero, brought in the young star.
Production team
The entire first season, thirteen episodes, was filmed before the first episode even aired. After the end of the second season, Williamson left to focus on Wasteland, a new show for ABC, but later returned to write the two-hour series finale. After Williamson's departure, Alex Gansa was selected as the new showrunner, but a production shutdown in addition to actors' unhappiness with the story lines at the start of season three led to Gansa being replaced by Greg Berlanti, who had been on the writing staff before Williamson's departure. Members of the series' writing staff would go on to create or write for other notable TV shows, including Gina Fattore (Gilmore Girls), Jenny Bicks (Sex and the City), Julie Plec (The Vampire Diaries), Tom Kapinos (Californication), Mike White (The White Lotus), and Dana Baratta (Jessica Jones).
Filming locations
During its first four seasons, Dawson's Creek was primarily filmed in Wilmington, North Carolina, at EUE/Screen Gems studios and on location around Wilmington, with Southport and Wrightsville Beach also standing in for the fictional town of Capeside, a port city located in mid-Cape Cod. The Wilmington area benefited greatly from the show. While a number of films, commercials and music videos had been shot at the studios, Dawson's Creek was the first to occupy numerous soundstages for many years. Other shows as One Tree Hill later occupied some of these same soundstages for several years and used some of the same locations in Wilmington. In addition to business brought into the community by the project, it attracted attention to the city as a filming location and boosted tourism. The visitors' bureau distributed a special guide to filming locations used in the show.
For the Leery, Lindley, and Potter homes private residences located along the shores of Hewletts Creek, a stream in New Hanover County, were used. Some of the scenes shown during the opening credits and miscellaneous scenery shots throughout the early episodes were filmed in Martha's Vineyard, an island off the coast of Massachusetts, as well as Masonboro. Interiors for the Potter family's Icehouse restaurant were filmed at The Icehouse bar in downtown Wilmington, while exteriors were filmed at the Dockside Restaurant in Wrightsville Beach. Nearby constructions at the real Icehouse later forced producers to eliminate the bar from the storyline by burning it down. Other prominent exterior shots include Alderman and Hoggard Halls on the University of North Carolina Wilmington campus, serving for Capeside High School.
Due to the architectural uniformity of the campus, it was difficult for the university to double as another campus in the show when the characters reached college in the fifth and sixth season. Therefore, scenes at the fictional Worthington University in Boston were filmed at Duke University and around Franklin Street at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Other filming locations in later seasons include Durham and Raleigh. The Hell's Kitchen bar featured in the show was a natural food store at 118 Princess Street in Wilmington which was purchased by producers, dressed as a seedy college bar and used for production during the show's last season. When production completed, the building was purchased by a local restaurateur, along with much of the set and decorations and was then converted into a real restaurant and bar that retains the same name.
Marketing
The WB spent an estimated $3 million on marketing the show several months ahead of the January 20, 1998, series premiere. Promotion included billboards in addition to trailers in theaters before screenings of films like Titanic, making The WB the first TV network to run trailers in movie theaters. A clip of the show was circulated to television critics and media outlets in the summer of 1997 which generated buzz for the show's risqué content that included frank sexual talk amongst teenagers and a romantic plot line between a teacher and a high school student.
J.Crew, which was the show's wardrobe provider, featured the then unknown cast for its winter-spring catalog. In January 1998, promos ran in Blockbuster video stores featuring the Paula Cole song "I Don't Want to Wait", which would later become the show's theme song after producers could not secure the rights for Alanis Morissette's "Hand in My Pocket". The WB's marketing campaign led Newsweek to remark Dawson's Creek is "as much a marketing event as a small-town serial about overheated hormones."
During the series' run, producers and writers were among the first to use cross-platform fan engagement through the series' official website, which was known as Dawson's Desktop. On the site, users could peruse "Dawson's multimedia journal and homework files, surf his bookmarked Web sites and listen to his CDs. They can read characters' e-mails and chats and go through their trash bins." According to show writer Jeffrey Stepakoff, "dawsonscreek.com [was] where fans could not only chat about the show, but tell us what they wanted to see next. The wishes of viewers had a very strong impact on the direction of the series. In fact, staff members were hired to interact regularly with fans online."
Broadcast
International
The show was broadcast in over 50 countries. It was especially popular in Australia, where it rated #1 in its time slot on Network Ten for several episodes and highly at other times from seasons one to four. Reruns of the show are often seen in Australia on 9Go!
In the United Kingdom, Dawson's Creek initially aired on Channel 4 and S4C but later moved to Channel 5 for its final season. In 2007, Channel 5's sister channel 5Star began airing reruns on weekdays. From April 2011, it aired on Sony Channel on the Sky digital platform. In November 2017, the full series returned to Channel 4's streaming service All 4. In May 2023, ITV2 started airing every Dawson's Creek episode on every weekday afternoons.
In Finland, the show aired on Yle.
In Italy, Dawson's Creek initially aired on the pay TV channel TELE+ Bianco, but later moved to the free-to-air TV channel Italia 1 for its last four seasons.
The show aired in New Zealand on TVNZ 2.
In Norway the show aired on TV3, and ran from 1999 to 2004.