Taking A Trip Down Dawson's Creek

Ahhh, summertime…when us sports fans shift our attention to NBA free agency, fantasy football pre-draft analysis, and (if all else fails) baseball. Similar to the sports front, primetime TV can be slim pickings when it comes to the dog days of summer. There are some hidden gems out there, but for the most part the summer months are none too kind to the ol’ DVR queue. Your best option is probably to turn to Netflix in this case, which can be dangerous in its own right…if you’re not careful, your wife will make you sit through old episodes of Dawson’s Creek.

If you guys only knew then what you know now.

Having made the mistake of telling Krissy that I never really watched it during its run on the WB (now the CW), she thought it would be a good idea to binge-watch our way through all 6 seasons. In all actuality, this has its pluses and minuses. On the 1 hand, if you don’t like the particular show (even if you do, really), binge-watching is like repeatedly bludgeoning yourself in the head with a hammer. On the other hand, you can burn through several seasons in the span of only a couple weeks, allowing you to forget the experience almost as quickly as it came into your life in the 1st place.

Additionally, having followed the show religiously during its initial run, Krissy had no need or desire to watch every show in its entirety. We watched just about all of seasons 1 and 2, mostly due to my “anal-ness,” I will admit. Around the beginning of season 3, I stopped caring so much, and let Krissy pick and choose the episodes of her liking. These usually involved some aspect of the Joey-Pacey love angle, which was by far her favorite aspect of Dawson’s Creek. While I wasn’t loving the show, I had still found myself somewhat invested though, and our skipping around left me asking, “Why are they doing that?” or, “What are they talking about?” multiple times per episode. Common sense usually overruled my anal-ness though, and I was able to let it go. By season 4, I didn’t care at all anymore, and I think we watched all of 3 episodes combined from seasons 5 and 6. For that reason alone, it was a relatively painless couple of weeks.

No Joey-Pacey love scenes were skipped over in the making of this blog.

Watching Dawson’s Creek now I couldn’t help but think how dated the show seems. It’s been less than a decade since it went off the air, but to say it didn’t age well is an understatement. Most, if not all, of the cockamamie schemes the teens from Capeside, MA, get into would be solved with cell phones now, and the amount of dudes wearing the plaid button-down/cargo shorts/Airwalks combo is remarkable. The other offputting thing about the show is that all the characters are a little too wordy and verbose for their own good…although I should probably steer clear of that argument given my ability to turn a 2 sentence blurb into an epic rant. Even amongst teen melodramas though, Dawson’s Creek makes you wonder how it stayed on the air for 6 years…but then you realize that the niche audience that is adolescent girls can keep a show alive for a long time…just look at One Tree Hill (9 seasons) as exhibit A.