Even though the end of Dawson’s Creek and currently airing 2025 TV shows have decades between them, the teen drama’s legacy continues to live on. The 1998 WB show helped launch multiple careers, including those of Katie Holmes, Michelle Williams and James Van Der Beek. Before its debut, the latter star didn’t expect much from being cast as Dawson Leery, but Van Der Beek reflected on how that feeling didn’t last long, thanks to few key happenings related to the pilot airing.
Van Der Beek, along with fellow ex-castmate Kerr Smith (who played Jack McPhee), attended Steel City Comic Con to dish about all things Capeside (via People). The Varsity Blues alum didn’t expect much to change from starring on the new but then smallish network teen show. Specifically, he shared that when he felt that previously for a movie he had done right before DC nothing came of it. Things started to click for him when people were talking about the billboards, and when he saw it for himself, he knew. In his words:
So when I was in Dawson’s Creek, we were in North Carolina — we were far, far, far from Hollywood, we were on the WB Network, which, at the time, was a network that I didn’t even get on my closed-circuit cable in my dorm room — so some people were saying, ‘Are you ready for this to change your life?’ [I was] like, ‘I’ve been down this road before. This is not going to change anything.’ And they said, ‘Oh no, they’re buying billboards,’ and I said, ‘Whatever.’ And then they flew me to L.A., and I saw a billboard with my face, like, blown up a thousand times bigger than my head already is, and I saw my name on the billboard.
Dawson’s went off the rails not long into the series). As we all know, as the show went on, Dawson Leery (Van Der Beek), Joey Potter (Holmes), Jen Lindley (Michelle Williams) and Pacey Witter (Joshua Jackson) slowly became unmistakable names and performers across pop culture. Most of the alumni, including the Varsity Blues actor, still get hounded about the iconic series randomly, although they did just celebrate the 20th anniversary not long ago.
As new waves of watchers tune in with a Hulu subscription, the discourse has expanded even more. Unfortunately for the ex-Capeside star, more people than ever think that Dawson Leery could be the absolute worst at times thanks to some pretty deplorable behavior. But for the most part, the Capeside clan and those who portrayed them will live more fondly in audiences’ memories.