If you were a teenager anywhere in the vicinity of the late 1990s, the opening bars of Paula Cole’s ‘I Don’t Want to Wait’ will only ever mean one thing: Dawson’s Creek. Airing on The WB from 1998 to 2003, and broadcast in the UK on Channel 4’s teen-oriented T4 block, the adolescent angst fest starred James van der Beek, who died earlier this month aged 48 from colorectal cancer. In a crowded field of literate pop culture, the smart, sexy soap opera stood out for its appeal to young adults who found in its storylines of mates, dates, and heartaches an echo of their own emotional turmoils.  

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Dawson’s Creek was to millennials as Fast Times at Ridgemont High and The Breakfast Club were to Gen-Xers: an attempt to capture the mood and experiences of a generation that, unlike the boomers, did not announce its arrival with social movements or cultural upheavals. The Dawson’s Creek generation turned its alienation inwards, into self-effacing self-analysis, and it was this tendency the series played up and gently satirised.  

The Dawson of the title was Dawson Leery (van der Beek) and the creek the sun-shimmering tributary that weaved along the idyllic Massachusetts settlement of Capeside, one of those Hollywood small towns where everyone looks like a GAP model, middle-income families........

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