Weekend Watch: 'Dawson's Creek's' Pilot

This Weekend Watch is dedicated to James Van Der Beek (1977–2026), who gave an entire generation—sensitive boys, included—permission to feel out loud.

Joey (Katie Holmes) climbs the ladder to Dawson’s (Van Der Beek) bedroom window the way she always does—but tonight, as she reaches the top, she stops. Inside, Dawson is showing Jen (Michelle Williams) his room, his Steven Spielberg posters, his whole interior life. Joey pauses on the rungs to avoid being seen. It’s almost halfway through the Dawson’s Creek pilot, which aired in January 1998, and director Steve Miner, who shot the episode on 16mm to give it the grain and warmth of an independent film, holds the frame just long enough for you to understand: something has changed, and everyone can feel it except the person it’s changing around.

It’s a small piece of visual storytelling in a show that became known for its verbal maximalism: teens who spoke in paragraphs, who analyzed love as though writing dissertations on it. But it tells you everything about what Dawson’s Creek understood from its very first episode—that adolescence is lived less in what gets said than in what is felt and not yet understood.

Kevin Williamson, who created the series fresh off the success of Scream, built the pilot around provocation. Nearly every subplot runs on sexual tension: Pacey (Joshua Jackson) pursues his teacher, while Joey asks Jen whether she’s a “size queen” in a crowded movie theater.

But at the center of all that charged energy sits Dawson Leery: earnest, emotionally open, and genuinely bewildered by everyone else’s fixation on sex. When he snaps at his father that all anyone around him thinks about is sex, it plays as both a teenager’s exasperation and something quieter: a boy asking for permission to care about other things. About connection and art; about whether the person across the bed is still his best friend.

Van Der Beek’s performance works because of the distance between what Williamson’s hyper-literate script asks and what Van Der Beek brings to it. The dialogue is ambitious, sometimes verbose—no actual 15-year-old talks about transcending the complications of puberty.

But that was the show’s charm, and Van Der Beek grounds every line in a sincerity so steady that it stops registering as artifice and starts feeling like the way this particular kid sees the world. Williamson later recalled in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter in 2018 that what struck him about Van Der Beek’s audition tape was a quality that was “cerebral and internal,” a 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.’” It was a perfect match: the character who feels too much, played by an actor willing to let that feeling sit on the surface.

That willingness was easy to poke fun at—and the internet eventually did, reducing six seasons of work into an animated GIF of Dawson crying. But watching the pilot now, after Van Der Beek’s death on Feb. 11 at age 48, the sincerity doesn’t read as naïve; it reads as foundational. This is where it started: a boy who loved Spielberg, who kept a poster of Always hidden in his closet, and who believed that telling someone the truth about how you feel shouldn’t require an apology.

The pilot drew nearly 6.8 million viewers—one of The WB’s highest-rated premieres at the time—and launched careers that would scatter in remarkable directions. Holmes auditioned from her basement in Ohio, her mother reading Dawson’s lines off-camera; Williams, who would go on to earn five Oscar nominations, impressed Williamson by transforming into what he called a “broken child who just needed to be fixed.” Jackson would eventually inherit the show’s emotional center as Pacey, and the cultural conversation has long since settled on the Pacey-Joey romance as the series’ real love story. But none of that happens without the tonal key Van Der Beek set in these first 44 minutes, which proposed, without quite announcing it, that a sensitive teenage boy’s interior life was worthy of being the center of a TV show.

Dawson’s Creek ran for six seasons and 128 episodes. It paved the way for Felicity, The O.C., One Tree Hill, Gilmore Girls, and a generation of emotionally fluent teen TV that followed. The show's influence is so embedded in how we tell coming-of-age stories now that it's easy to forget it wasn't always like this—that before Dawson's Creek, a teen boy on TV rarely got to sit with his feelings long enough for the audience to sit with them too. The pilot is where that started. And at its center was a young actor, just arrived from off-Broadway, who understood something the rest of TV would need another decade to catch up to—that sincerity, offered unflinchingly, was not a weakness to be outgrown. It was the one thing worth building a story around.

Stream Dawson’s Creek on Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, and Tubi.