Date of airing: January 20, 1998 (WB)
Nielsen ratings information: 6.75 million viewers, 4.8/7 in Households
The show has been making its rounds on both the iTunes store and Amazon Prime, which means better-looking quality was available that could replace the DVD collection I once had of the show. Every once in a while I wonder why I even bought the DVDs during my early 20s, but then I remembered I was weirdly obsessed with DAWSON’S CREEK years before, even though I knew the show wasn’t the greatest, sometimes annoyed and frustrated me, and was generally not regarded as great television from where I come from (which is not the United States). I continue to wonder if the show still holds the same level of charm it did when I was an impressionable teenager, or if it may be one of those TV wonders from yesteryear that has not stood the test of time. Has DAWSON’S CREEK aged terribly or like fine wine? Do 15-year-old teenagers still speak like the way they did in Capesite, or has TikTok, Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook ruined grammar and language skills? Would I even buy the fact that James Van Der Beek is playing a 15-year-old kid with his 18-year-old mind, his 30-year-old face, and the voice of a 45-year-old who has found out that smoking kills? And the most important question: How does the Tamara Jacobs character hold up now, compared to 25 years ago when the male fantasy of having a sexual relationship with your hot English teacher was something to dream about, and which has now turned into a clear depiction of grooming and sexual assault?
Yes, let’s begin with Pacey’s story of having a fling with his English teacher Ms. Jacobs. In hindsight – and remembering the rest of the story – it’s awful to have a teenager get used by a lonely woman like this, and it’s not like there isn’t real-life precedence (the Mary Kay Letourneau story having been media fodder the year prior), but something is refreshing about the teacher/student relationship being told from the student’s point of view, specifically hearing Pacey use the word “fantasy,” as he was telling himself how he is going to lose his virginity, which is something most boys his age would do when confronted with an opportunity like he has. Still, this story was all kinds of wrong, especially at the end of it when Pacey came to speak his mind in front of a seemingly saddened Ms. Jacobs, saying that he is “the best sex you’ll never have.” Not only did Ms. Jacobs decide that Pacey has been groomed in record time and is ready for reaping, but the story told from the boy’s point of view made it look like this is one of the most normal things that could happen to a 15-year-old boy talking about sex with older women like he has experience in the field while forgetting to talk about how he was inexperienced like all of us were at 15 years of age.
In addition, this is a situation Pacey was actively searching out, not caring about the person he would hurt in his process of wanting to lose his virginity. As someone clever enough to come up with the “I’m the best sex you’ll never have” line in the first place, one might think he would also come to the realization that his actions are going to ruin not only him, but Ms. Jacobs as well. As I said, the Letourneau case was everywhere in media while Kevin Williamson was writing the script for this episode and developing the show, so I’m allowed to wonder what Williamson thought while coming up with the story. Did he watch the news and figure he must tell the story from the groomed student’s point of view? Would the dramatic fallout of the story be lessened if told from Pacey’s point of view, since the writers wouldn’t have to focus on the criminal aspect of Ms. Jacobs’s actions? Or did Williamson purposely decide to use Pacey as the point of view, knowing that the audience already went through the story once the year before, so it needed a “fresh” new direction?
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| Dawson is the perfect male specimen: He takes up most of the bed space. |
It’s one of those stories that probably defined DAWSON’S CREEK as a show during its first season (I can’t speak of how it appeared to the 1998 audience, since I didn’t live in the US and couldn’t experience the hype during the show’s premiere), and it’s a story you could write dissertations about how either awful or genius it was for broadcast television (it’s mostly awful, but also risque). I can barely remember the story, since the last time I have watched this season was about 15 years before the time of this writing (so I’m nicely distanced from the entire show, and I can barely even remember what happened during the final season), but I still remember the Pacey/Ms. Jacobs story, simply because of the mixture of it being audacious, controversial, and a 15-year-old boy’s secret dream. As Pacey said, it’s every 15-year-old’s fantasy come true. The boy audience was living vicariously through Pacey in 1998, so I can somewhat understand the fascination of the story.
However, this isn’t “Pacey’s Creek,” this show is titled DAWSON’S CREEK, and fascinatingly enough, the story told in the pilot wasn’t even dealing with Dawson’s emotional minefield when it comes to the main plot of the episode, and possibly the entire plot of the series: Dawson and Joey, the obvious romantic couple-to-be, waiting for the moment to get together and spend the rest of their lives with another, waiting for the scene of their first kiss and having sex for the first time. There is some great story-building in here, with the potential of Dawson and Joey as a couple not even being the major focus of the episode, while Williamson put time into developing the other characters, knowing that the central couple-to-be will command the majority of screentime in upcoming episodes. Because if you were about to build an extended storyline about a romance, slowly developing it with each episode, you have a lot of time to also give attention to other characters. And with that extra time, this teenage TV drama turns out to not just be a smalltown series about a few characters dealing with smalltown lives no one in a big city cares about, it’s also a story about teenagers whose only thought process currently is all about sex (giving the show a realistic edge that is immediately taken away by its sophisticated dialogue). Dawson was talking about it with his father, completely neglecting the “birds and the bees” talk, and there was a sexual sub-tone between him and Joey in the movie theater, when all Joey could think about was how much experience Jen had as a sexual being and how Jen was using that experience to take Dawson away from her, ruining everything that has been “normal” in her life previously.
It’s funny that Joey’s insecurities were born out of Jen’s actions. Jen was the one instigating this entire thing – she was the one who gave life to the story of Joey and Dawson being the couple-to-be (a simple and cheap plot device to get the audience used to the thought of Joey and Dawson), and she was the one immediately growing into the habit of winning the boy over before the competition (Joey) did it. If it weren’t for Jen’s sudden arrival in Capesite, would Joey even have bothered thinking about her feelings for Dawson and left it at the conversation she had with him after finishing E.T.: THE EXTRATERRESTRIAL? This episode was giving a little bit of a mystery in that regard, as its story was centered on Joey – Dawson mostly didn’t care about the emotional minefield of 15-year-olds, the boys were just thinking about sex, so talking about themselves is pretty much out of the question – and turning DAWSON’S CREEK into a series that should be titled “Joey’s Creek” instead. Since Dawson was considered the central character of the show (by putting his name into the title), putting Joey in the middle of the narrative seems like a happy accident, or maybe just a clever foreshadowing, considering the character’s growth in later seasons. But since Williamson wasn’t working on the show after he left at the end of season two, the foreshadowing thing is probably just my imagination.
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| A 15-year-old girl's first acquaintance with lipstick looks like this. |
Meanwhile, this pilot also made clear that this wasn’t just the Dawson/Joey show. Pacey already got a fair amount of screentime with his own story (whether or not the story is a disaster in hindsight), and so did Jen, the new girl in town who might be the most promiscuous of them all, because she comes from the big city and therefore is believed to have the experience in certain things. I found her scene with her grandmother (saying she is not a believer and trying to ease their relationship with her sense of humor) quite interesting, even if it happened to show Jen in a way that portrays her way too mature for her age and whatever her experiences may be (a 15-year-old promiscuous girl is still a girl in the end and not a fully grown woman in the body of a child). Besides that, she makes for a great third wheel in the Dawson/Joey romance drama, in which she becomes the obstacle course of the two’s journey, while also being her own character in her own narrative, with her own personal demons to fight against. Usually, when a couple-to-be is dealing with obstacles in the form of other people, those people are one-dimensional plot devices. But Jen turns out to be a central character with depth from the beginning, giving her the edge to start becoming her own person.
After one hour, DAWSON’S CREEK has aged like a certain brand of wine. I can’t name a brand of wine right now because I don’t drink wine and I have no knowledge about wine, but I wouldn’t say the show has aged like fine wine – for that to have happened, Ms. Jacobs should have never been part of the narrative. The music allows me to jump back into a musical era of 1990s kitsch music (albeit lovable kitsch music, as well as songs I can’t hear any longer, like Tubthumping – the World Cup 98 PC game has ruined the song for me forever), and the Twentysomethings cast as teenagers who just came out of junior high school can be a quite hilarious sight at times. Except for Katie Holmes. She is stellar. She is wonderful. She is persona non grata. Joey Potter happens to be my favorite fictional girlfriend, so there is no attacking her or the person who portrays her.
