What Dawson Leery Taught Us About Boyhood

Actor James Van Der Beek’s death last week made our writer reflect on what this sensitive character gave to ’90s television.

As a millennial who grew up during the height of Dawson’s Creek’s popularity, I was surrounded by girls who saw themselves in Joey Potter. She practically defined the ’90s girl-next-door ideal. But for me, Dawson Leery was always the character who felt the most accessible.

Like Dawson, I was an only child, an old soul, a storyteller, and a bit of a misfit. I, too, had a flair for the dramatic and a rich inner life, which is really just a fancy way of saying we both grew up with raging cases of Main Character Syndrome. 

To me, Dawson felt like a true representation of teen angst. Sure, he looked like a standard issue heartthrob, but he didn’t feel like one. He felt awkward and insecure and painfully adolescent. 

While Dawson’s Creek was wildly popular, Dawson himself wasn’t always well-received by audiences. But he was an important character. And in him, I imagine, many young boys saw a representation of all the things they were quietly working through in their own lives.

When I heard of James Van Der Beek’s untimely death, I immediately thought of his family. Soon after, I thought of Dawson. 

Van Der Beek had a prolific career, but Dawson was easily his most iconic role. The character’s legacy is a part of Van Der Beek’s own, at least to those of us who only knew the actor through the screen. And while I didn’t know Van Der Beek, it seems he—like the character he played—also displayed the sort of vulnerability our world often tells men and boys to suppress. 

Through Dawson, Van Der Beek taught a generation about boyhood. His character grappled frequently with ideas of masculinity. He was endlessly insecure about the fact that he didn’t fit the bulky, jockish, virile, oversexed caricature of masculinity we’ve all been fed. Did Dawson always handle these insecurities correctly? Absolutely not. He had moments colored by “toxic nice guy” energy—the kind that makes a boy complain about being “friend zoned” as though he is entitled to a girl’s romantic attention just because he’s nice to her. His behavior was, at times, insufferable. 

But it also felt like the most tangible, explicitly voiced expression of what so many teen boys everywhere were struggling with in their own lives. The fear of being too nerdy, too small, too inexperienced, too weird, too nice, or too weak feels like a universal part of boyhood—yet it’s something we rarely see accurately reflected in pop culture. Dawson was the blueprint, a new archetype of teenage boys on TV. I’d even go so far as to say that Dawson walked so The OC’s Seth Cohen and Gossip Girl’s Dan Humphrey could run. 

As a viewer, you got the sense that Dawson felt like he was in the spotlight narrating his own life. But it also felt as though he was out of the frame entirely, behind the camera filming as everybody else moved around him. It was classic filmmaker behavior, and also textbook teen angst. 

Dawson was melodramatic and idealistic. But at the end of the day, isn’t that the most realistic take on the teenage years? Didn’t we all spend those formative years feeling like all the odds were stacked against us, even when they very likely weren’t? Didn’t we all imagine ourselves at the center of a tiny universe, only to grow up and realize there’s so much more out there?

As an audience, we watched Dawson start to become a man. He didn’t shed his main character energy, but he did gain a sense of self-awareness around it. In the series finale of Dawson’s Creek, Dawson and Joey sit together as he reflects, in typical self-important fashion, about the cyclic nature of life. “Fiction is fiction,” he says. “For the first time in a long time, my life is real.” 

The scene—which you absolutely will not be able to watch without crying— highlights the meta nature of it all: The show was literally called “Dawson’s Creek,” even though the character certainly didn’t own the body of water. The whole point all along was that we were watching drama and heartache and personal evolution unfold through the lens of a teenage boy. And how often does that happen? How often do we put our focus on the depth of a boy’s feelings? I think of the infamous “Dawson crying meme,” and how it has become a punchline. I wonder how, even with examples like Dawson Leery on our screens, we still find a boy or a man expressing his feelings so openly to be a joke. 

Since hearing of Van Der Beek’s death, I’ve been poking around the internet to see what other Dawson’s Creek fans took from his character. 

The consensus is clear: Most viewers found Dawson annoying, entitled, whiny, and self-absorbed. And they’re right. But he was also a hopeless romantic, a sensitive soul, and a dreamy idealist. He was all the things our world tells boys not to be. 

We didn’t get to see who the full scope of who Dawson Leery would have aged into, but we did get to see, albeit from a distance, Van Der Beek as a man, a husband, and a father of six. And we saw why Dawson was such a convincingly fresh take on a leading man: Because Van Der Beek himself embodied that same sort of sensitivity and sentimentality in real life. 

Through Dawson Leery, we learned that boys can feel things deeply. And through James Van Der Beek’s reflections on fatherhood, illness, and ultimately mortality, we learned that grown men can too.

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