Everybody plays the cool

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By Frances Grant

The Box


The appeal of teen drama Dawsons Creek is obvious. The kids in the small town of Capeside have amazing problems, far above the usual adolescent issues like skin breakouts and the wrong kinds of clothes.

Dawson and the gang have the kind of quality, intensely dramatic problems and angst that real teenagers long to have.

They're sophisticated problems, full of drama. Gosh, one of their schoolmates even died last week and it wasn't the kind of death which could be dealt with by a straightforward grieving process.

As well as getting to stand around in lots of cool black clothing, scowling, the gang got to wrestle, really wrestle, with all these guilty feelings about hating the dead one when she was living.

They have even better problem parents. Andy's mother is mad. Jack is gay and his father had a big problem with that a while back. Joey's mother died of cancer. Joey's father came out of prison last week and immediately cooked up some wild scheme about catering a wedding.

The gang also have great vocabularies, all the better to mull over all that tough stuff that life deals them. Most people spend their teenage years doing little more than grunting.

Not this crew. Dad's wild catering plans were "compounding her anxieties," said Joey, whose turn it was to be chief worrywort in this episode. Her friend, Jack, agreed the scheme was "ill-conceived." Joey did some more fretting about having a father who was an "infamous philanderer and drug-dealer."

Jen, who is the whiniest of all the characters, had yet another moan about the pointlessness of trading in her wild-child image for a "pristine existence."

Those characters not actually in the throes of a dilemma exercise their talent for spotting and articulating potential problems in other people's lives. Take Andy's observation about marriage: "It may look perfect but scratch beneath the surface and you find estrangement, despair and dysfunction."

Back in the 80s, teen dramas like Beverly Hills 90210 encouraged their young viewers to lust after consumer items like cellphones and sports cars rather than aspire to increase their word-power.

The Dawson's Creek gang's way with words would be truly impressive if the show didn't suffer from that American teen drama phenomenon of measuring age by some system different from our calendar years.

Just like a dog who is 83 in "dog years" but only about 10 in human years, the gang are aged 16 in "Dawson's Creek years" but look considerably older than that. Some of them look about the same age as their problem parents.

Nothing ages like worry. The severity of these young folks' problems could in itself prove problematic. At this rate, by the time this series of the show finishes next month, the gang will probably be gray-haired and stooped. And that's not cool.