Dawson Leery was the Tony Soprano of fictional teenage nonsense

I spent a lot of my pre-teens angry at James Van Der Beek. On Dawson’s Creek, the treacly Nineties soap about a quartet of romantically incestuous and eerily articulate teenagers, Van Der Beek’s titular Dawson was basically Satan with an *NSYNC haircut. He was a boy chronically high off his own fumes, a whiny, virginal manipulator of fragile young women, and a bafflingly wrong-headed film bro with a poster of Steven Spielberg’s slave epic Amistad on his bedroom wall. He had an ugly cry, which I found completely hilarious long before a shot of it was immortalised as a GIF on the early internet, and I got a perverse thrill from the fact that Katie Holmes’s Joey ran off at show’s end not with him but with Joshua Jackson’s Pacey, like any smart person would.

Van Der Beek, who has died with cancer at the age of 48, never really escaped the shadow of Dawson Leery, a fact he initially seemed frustrated with, then accepting of (he’d later brilliantly mock his goofy, posturing Dawson-ness on a sitcom called Don’t Trust the B---- in Apartment 23, where he played a goofy, posturing version of himself). And it’s potentially the reason his death hits as hard as it does. Unlike, to varying degrees, his co-stars (most obviously the multiple Oscar nominee Michelle Williams, portrayer of the show’s cool, doomed Jen), Van Der Beek always felt a bit fossilised in a particular time period; an eternal teenager in dire need of being pelted with fruits and vegetables (complimentary). I still remember those rages of mine. And the feeling of sighing with exasperation at him, every Sunday morning in front of T4. It speaks to just how good he was at being the absolute worst.

Dawson’s Creek was a teen TV fantasy land, with Dawson its swoonworthy but infuriating king, who’d watch Schindler’s List on a date and flee arguments in a tiny row boat. Most of us seemed to come to its more earthbound US cousins – among them the short-lived but beloved My So-Called Life and Freaks and Geeks – far later than they first aired, on borrowed DVDs or via lo-res YouTube rips. Dawson’s Creek was comparatively massive in the UK from day one, given column inches, tie-in books, Mizz magazine covers and Smash Hits pull-out posters. Its four leads graduated to movie stardom within months of its debut in 1998. But its sheer bigness also made sense: there was always something preternaturally beguiling about the show, from its sun-dappled coastal setting and beautiful leads, to the wordy neuroses of creator Kevin Williamson’s dialogue. It felt expensive, all-American, sophisticated. Who were the teenagers we meant to look up to on homegrown television back then? Sonia off EastEnders?

Like Sex and the City or the Spice Girls, there was a character for each personality type. Studious and confused? You were Joey. Scrappy and horny? You were Pacey. Hot mess with a past? You were Jen. Identifying most with Dawson, though, felt like marking yourself with a scarlet letter. It probably meant you were covertly mean, or judgmental, insecure or self-righteous. Or that one day someone would telegraph their upset with you by posting a particularly aggrieved Taylor Swift lyric as their Facebook status. No one wanted to be Dawson. But arguably that was because he was the least fantastical character on the Creek. He was just a grumpy, cocky, casually cruel teenage boy. And who likes to see one of those on TV?

Dawson’s Creek sat earnestly between the early Nineties glam of Beverly Hills 90210 and the Y2K opulence of The OC and Gossip Girl, while borrowing the self-referential wit of Williamson’s hit 1996 movie Scream. It was its own beast: it happily embraced the sillier tropes of adolescent storytelling (love triangles, prom dates, flings with teachers), while having its characters regularly acknowledge that they were inside a kind of living soap opera. And it was huge at a time where everything America produced on television felt so grand and cinematic all of a sudden. If you loved Dawson’s, you probably loved Friends, and Buffy, and The X-Files.

I’ve re-watched Dawson’s Creek a slightly embarrassing number of times since it first aired, returning to it at big moments of transition in life, or periods of emotional funk. I’m still not sure if it was ever technically “good” television, but it has real soulfulness to it, its drama comprised of pleasingly mundane break-ups and get-togethers, its score a gentle, wistful flutter. Its theme song was so loud and risible (“I don’t wanna wait!”) that it became a generational earworm. And it hits differently as you age. Joey is a dazzling dreamgirl when you’re 12, but a tedious wet blanket when you’re 21. As a teenager, your favourite pairing is Joey and Pacey (even if you will always find it weird that they spent three months alone together on a boat without ever once having sex). Hurtling towards your mid-thirties, you will suddenly realise that the show’s greatest and most important love story was between Jen and her grandmother.

And then there’s Dawson, the cursed force around which the entire series spins. Really, Van Der Beek had the toughest job on the show. Even if it takes a good three or four rewatches to see it. Dawson was the show’s star but not its hero, his penchant for strops and guilt trips the engine for all of its soapy contrivances. It was thrilling to loathe him, and Van Der Beek was always up for making him as jagged and unpleasant as possible. Think of Dawson Leery as Carrie Bradshaw in Nineties plaid. Or the Tony Soprano of fictional teenage nonsense. And whether or not Van Der Beek ever found another role that matched the character’s reach, what a fun, important legacy to have: the first boy that made so many of us want to hurl things at the TV. In tribute, we should all hop in a row boat and be annoying.