Dawson's Creek
Sep. 6th, 2010 05:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroI got the Dawson's Creek full series brick set for my last birthday, and opened it up today on a whim. I ended up watching episode 2x16 "Be Careful What You Wish For", which features Dawson's 16th birthday party.
I'll note that I watched pretty much the entire series as it aired--I might have missed one or two season 1 episodes, but given that it ran from my junior year of high school through my college career, I was pretty much in the target age group. Also, I'll admit to being a sap for teenage drama.
The first thing I noticed was the relative strength of each of the actors, in hindsight. Joshua Jackson was actually one of the strongest actors on that show, especially when they were giving him snarky dialogue. Second place goes to Michelle Williams (though this episode fell into the very unfortunate "Cyndi Lauper hair" phase), and Kerr Smith (especially since not only is the actor not gay, he wasn't told his character would be gay until midway through his first season--a fact I didn't catch on to, and didn't learn until years later). Meredith Monroe unfortunately has stage actor sensibilities, which makes everything she does on camera seem over-the-top. Katie Holmes, the youngest of the group, starts off the weakest but pretty much catches up to James Van Der Beek by late second season and overtakes him by the end of the series. (Technically, Nina Repeta, Dawson's mom, was a "main" character and she kinda grates on me, but we saw less and less of her as the series went on.)
Also, the show improved so much when the characters went off to college and the ditched all the plotlines that involved the "adults". Grams was the only adult on that show worthy of the title, and she just got increasingly awesome as the show went on.
Anyways, I'd actually been looking for 2x12 "Uncharted Waters", which at the very end has Abby make a speech that earned my loyalty for five more seasons. Andy finds her out of the lawn in the morning, having stormed out of a sleepover but not gone home. At this point, Abby has been basically an antagonistic bitch, seemingly with nothing to her life but causing trouble for these characters. Andy calls her on it, and Abby acts as the mouthpiece for a pissed-off showrunner for 45 seconds, explaining that she doesn't have a crazy mother, or tragic home life, or father in prison, or debauched secret history. She has a boring, normal life, which means the only thing there is for her to do is be an antagonist to them. As this was the first time I'd ever seen a minor character stand up and say, "I'm a minor character! I do what I must!" I vowed to keep watching for another such moment. There were probably half a dozen of them in total, and when I next feel the urge, I'll probably try to hunt down the others.
I'll note that I watched pretty much the entire series as it aired--I might have missed one or two season 1 episodes, but given that it ran from my junior year of high school through my college career, I was pretty much in the target age group. Also, I'll admit to being a sap for teenage drama.
The first thing I noticed was the relative strength of each of the actors, in hindsight. Joshua Jackson was actually one of the strongest actors on that show, especially when they were giving him snarky dialogue. Second place goes to Michelle Williams (though this episode fell into the very unfortunate "Cyndi Lauper hair" phase), and Kerr Smith (especially since not only is the actor not gay, he wasn't told his character would be gay until midway through his first season--a fact I didn't catch on to, and didn't learn until years later). Meredith Monroe unfortunately has stage actor sensibilities, which makes everything she does on camera seem over-the-top. Katie Holmes, the youngest of the group, starts off the weakest but pretty much catches up to James Van Der Beek by late second season and overtakes him by the end of the series. (Technically, Nina Repeta, Dawson's mom, was a "main" character and she kinda grates on me, but we saw less and less of her as the series went on.)
Also, the show improved so much when the characters went off to college and the ditched all the plotlines that involved the "adults". Grams was the only adult on that show worthy of the title, and she just got increasingly awesome as the show went on.
Anyways, I'd actually been looking for 2x12 "Uncharted Waters", which at the very end has Abby make a speech that earned my loyalty for five more seasons. Andy finds her out of the lawn in the morning, having stormed out of a sleepover but not gone home. At this point, Abby has been basically an antagonistic bitch, seemingly with nothing to her life but causing trouble for these characters. Andy calls her on it, and Abby acts as the mouthpiece for a pissed-off showrunner for 45 seconds, explaining that she doesn't have a crazy mother, or tragic home life, or father in prison, or debauched secret history. She has a boring, normal life, which means the only thing there is for her to do is be an antagonist to them. As this was the first time I'd ever seen a minor character stand up and say, "I'm a minor character! I do what I must!" I vowed to keep watching for another such moment. There were probably half a dozen of them in total, and when I next feel the urge, I'll probably try to hunt down the others.
