I was under the weather one day last week, but it ended up turning out to be a good thing for me. By sheer coincidence, I was flipping by TBS and discovered on that very morning that they were going to begin re-running Dawson’s Creek. While the later seasons of the show have been nothing but another nighttime soap opera, the first couple of seasons were a whole other matter. Watching the first four episodes of the series again made me remember just how brilliant the writing was during that first season. Sure the cast used a few too many big words, but a show where characters have an actual vocabulary has always been a plus in my books. And sure, Dawson was too uptight for his own good, although I would have to admit to seeing a little bit of myself in him. But the perfect casting and the smart dialogue always transcended any problems the show had. And, I’ll admit it, Katie Holmes as the girl every guy only wishes that he had living next door to him helped make the show for me. It’s no surprise to me that as the show is airing the end of its run on The WB that she is the one with the most solid film career out of her talented co-workers. Sadly, the show lost most of its luster for me in the seasons that followed, a fact that I attribute mostly to the fact that the show’s creator, Kevin Williamson, moved on to other projects. He was the creative genius that made those early episodes so special. I stopped watching somewhere around the third season I think. The fact that the show became more and more like every other teen drama on TV diminished my interest in it. I’ll no doubt try to watch the later episodes of the show that I skipped now that it is readily available in rerun form. But even if they are no better this time around than they were originally, I will still have that opening season to look forward too again and again. For me, it stands as possibly one of the best single seasons of any show on television. No doubt I’ll tune in to the final few episodes that air on The WB in the coming weeks to watch the show’s finale. And no doubt I’ll be a little sad to see it go, even if I haven’t been a regular or even semi-regular viewer in the last couple of years. Although I suspect I would be a little sadder had the quality of the show from season one been maintained throughout the entire run. At the very least, I’m confident that the final episode will be a memorable one since Kevin Williamson will return to pen one last script for the show that he created.

¶ 4/15/2003 06:09:00 PM

Post a Comment