Who's got "The Creek?"
By Jay Horton

I'm dating and about to marry a girl who has never seen an episode of "Dawson's Creek." That she's never seen "Star Wars", I'd guessed. That she has no real memory of the Reagan administration makes me a little tingly, tell the truth, but I'd always imagined sharing my life with someone at least passingly familiar with the cultural framework for all my romantic posturing.

Living through the WB shouldn't be expected, I suppose, and her complete disinterest provides some comfort; she actually thinks my dialogue original. But she doesn't at all understand why anyone of, ahem, my advanced age should so treasure an unreconstructed teen-age soap.

She's wrong, of course. "The Creek" defined a generation. And I remain 22.

1998: Suffering the throes of abandonment, I almost write a personal ad demanding someone; looks, age, character, irrelevant; Katie Holmes resemblance a plus; to join me each Wednesday at eight, cuddle, empathize and immediately leave.

I do write the ad, sort of. I scrawl it on a cocktail napkin and shyly present it to a platonic gal-pal for, um, comment. After 40 seconds of sustained, panty pinching laughter, the ad is crumpled and withdrawn. The girl herself preferred "7th Heaven." That should be noted.

1999: Suffering the rigors of contentment, the new, old flame and I regularly double and triple-date to massed "Dawson's" episodes in the wee small hours while spinning our own stoopidly untrue high school yarns.

One regular on those Monday mornings, dragged along by his bedmate, resisted for weeks, grumbling and sullen. A young punk and blossoming carpenter who remembered high school as he remembered the DMV - pointless, bureaucratic and maddeningly dull, but, in the end, only a few hours wasted. He viewed all TV this side of The History Channel as queer and decadent and wholly absent everything he enjoyed.

Two months through the season, he'd surrendered to "The Creek" with a stoic fascination. After three months, he'd glare down dismissive friends at the bar: "Have you fucking even watched the show?"

2000: Obsessively e-mailing my long lost college paramour. I realized I'd lost any accurate physical memory of the gal. And I decided she looked like Jen Linley, of course. And, as Jen would, she protested the shitheaded intensity of my nerdiness, retaining the pseudonym for years after.

To those unfamiliar, to those still reading: "Dawson's Creek" detailed the antics of four crazy kids (attractive, vibrant, impossibly articulate) down that contrived funnel of self's destruction and discovery and obsession we call high school. Pacey - the dirty old man written as Tom Sawyer. Jen Linley - the fuck-happy, gigglingly-doomed Veronica. Joey Potter - the loyal, troubled Betty.

And Dawson. Who never once dared believe he was not the hero of his own story. And knew the consequences of a man that prized fantasy before existence.

Of all the programs pimping co-ed reverence, "Dawson's Creek" alone understood that the reflexive disgust, the timid boundary pushing, the fuck-or-flight ennui of adolescence mirrored the conventions of adolescent soaps perfectly and tragically. However self-referential and poll-driven, "Dawson's Creek" hated itself, hated its strictures, hated everything it was supposed to be and absorbed every criticism with a painful, palpable self-knowledge.

And, for a few glorious years, "Dawson's Creek" was high school. With proper dialogue. Everyone in high school knows they're on television. Constantly. Somewhere. The geekiest A/V kid imagines an ironic, inexplicable, tongue-laden twist to Friday's party. Our fave deb pretends so-called inner depths. Revenge fantasies abound. And, imagining they're on television, believing they're on television, they act accordingly - with stilted exchanges, fated patterns, aspiring to emotions they've sampled somewhere beyond memory.

The week after "Dawson's" finale, gawkier hipster legions mourned "Buffy's" passing - an arousing satire well-crafted to remind attentive viewers that they're better than high school, better than television - an extended skit that may as well have had advisory warnings against character study. It's only TV, right?

"Buffy" never bothered with characters, never examined them further than a soap-cartoon canvas for glib spatterings, anyway, and appropriated high school for, as a rather clever "Li'l X-Files." It was an extended metaphor - the thumpingly obvious notion that our most fantastical monsters spring from childhood trauma.

More than metaphor, far more than satire, "Dawson's" saw high school as primer for modernity, as unalloyed origin and abattoir of all essential questions and frustrations and desires and existential tropes spoken about AS existential tropes. That the kids from "The Creek" forced a hyper-articulate verbiage - no less believable than Sunnydale's Neil-Simon-illiteracy - demanded greater consideration and disallowed passive abeyance, challenging preconceptions as the starlets disrobed.

We ennoble those shows that promote a halting, mannered artistry and crowd to praise the knowing smirk. "Dawson's Creek," for the years we'll remember, very much at the end, nudged believable characters through pop drama with a singular, true voice that always respected its message - otherwise smart folks, absent perspective and experience, sculpt lives on instinct - and its medium. It's only a high school soap, right? Start taking that seriously, start taking high school seriously, and you'll never get to sleep.

I did tape the last episode for the girl and made the appropriate bribes. Writer Kevin Williamson returned, the characters jumped forward five years - allowing all involved to pretend the last few seasons never happened - and we watched Dawson, as young exec of his own teen soap, dramatize the salient episodes of his own adolescence.

She appreciated the intricacies, at least she pretended, and genuinely laughed at the sharper lines. Near the end, as Dawson re-imagined high school for his program, bending truths, creating the high school that should have been, I teared up for a moment. She threw a full Pabst at the television.

Jen Linley would've drank the beer, I think, or downed her scotch and Xanax. And we'd bitch about cheerleaders. I need to talk to my producers