Dawson’s Creek: A show named after the wrong character
The late 1990s and early 2000s were big for the teen genre, with television networks pushing to center stage the teen soap opera. One of the most infamous and groundbreaking was Kevin Williamson’s 1998 show, Dawson’s Creek, which starred heartthrobs of the time such as Katie Holmes. The show followed Dawson Leery, your typical small-town, love-sick film geek, who remained hopelessly unaware that his best friend and resident tomboy, Josephine “Joey” Potter, was in love with him. The two best friends, along with class clown Pacey Witter and a new girl from New York City, Jennifer Lindley, grapple with the pressures of growing up and falling in love in the coastal town of Capeside.
When Dawson’s Creek premiered, the writers thought they had the perfect protagonist in Dawson Leery. He was innocent yet emotionally intelligent, and the actor James Van Der Beek had a charming smile that seemed to sway the teen audience of the time. Unfortunately, Dawson’s character was riddled with unintentional character flaws that mirror the “nice guy” discourse of today.
Dawson was the most insufferable character, but existed in a show which thought him incapable of misbehavior. Throughout the first season, Dawson continually slut-shamed his love interest, Jennifer, for her past sexual experience, which was caused by gross over-sexualization of her by older men in New York. Despite this, the show painted him as just an insecure kid still learning how to treat women. While it’s true that he was young and inexperienced, this doesn’t excuse his behavior. He may apologize for his poor actions, but it doesn’t stop him from becoming worse as the series progresses and he and Joey begin their romance in the following seasons.
Another “nice guy” moment from Dawson is when he reads Joey’s diary and then yells at her for writing down her anger with him after a previous fight. He felt he had a right to read her innermost thoughts, and his lesson was shrugged aside by the end of the episode. Later, when Joey and Pacey develop feelings for each other in the show’s third and fan-favorite season, Dawson tries to emotionally blackmail Joey by revealing his true feelings for her. To him, she’s his property, and he deserves to be with her because he’s a “nice guy”, unlike his supposed screwup friend Pacey.
While the show follows Dawson making mistakes and learning the wrong lessons, his sidekick friend Pacey Witter develops as a character each season. Pacey has been hailed as the fan-favorite for his charisma and respectful treatment of his love interests, as well as for being an all-around more compelling character. As this show has been out for longer than I have been alive, I’m not the first to say that Pacey would have made a better main character. Dawson’s attitudes toward women and dating have aged extremely poorly. He has a habit of expressing ownership of the women in his life and shames anyone who has more sexual experience than himself. Meant to be the sweet and angelic main character of the teen soap opera, Dawson turned out to be the least favorite among fans, with his actions mirroring the toxic “nice guy” behaviors we have become adept at spotting. The show should have been called Pacey’s Creek.