An Unnecessary Season of Television: Season 6 of Dawson's Creek

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The attractive season six cast of Dawson's Creek

Aristotle wrote that the beginning of a play is complete when a dramatist has established a situation that implicitly contains the conclusion. Few would describe TV executives as Aristotelian. The beginning of any TV show is complete whenever a studio believes it has a premise that will drive years of profits (and stories). Its conclusion depends on when advertisers no longer want to advertise, or whenever the metrics, in the streaming age, indicate x show is no longer profitable. Art is beside the point.

The sixth season of Dawson’s Creek taught me that not all TV storytelling — not all popular culture — is art. William Gass, the late High Modernist writer, believed that “since the works of popular culture are mired in competition, are fad-producing, have little to no sense of beauty, are devoid of finish, complexity, stasis, individuality, coherence, depth, and endurance, it is a mistake to compare them to works of art.” TV shows exist to sell ads and for those ads to sell to us, whether those ads air in traditional commercials or whether they’re embedded within an episode as product placement. “Popular culture is the product of an industrial machine which makes baubles to amuse the savages while missionaries steal their souls and merchants steal their money.”

Dawson’s Creek once produced a complete episode of television, during its sixth and final season, that exists only as a commercial for No Doubt’s 2002 record Rock Steady. The episode resembles an MTV special devoted to the band’s newest release: it features three full length performances, an array of merchandising shots, and multiple close-ups of the Rock Steady jewel case. Scant storytelling — Dawson and his girlfriend trying to find a spot in the arena to have sex; Pacey and Audrey hating each other — happens between the promotional elements of the episode.

The last season of Dawson’s Creek represented TV in its purest form: it was without meaning, without substance, and only existed to sell products to a demographic valued by advertisers — thus the stories, the thing for which audiences endure ads, is a mish-mash of nonsense, plot devices, and contrivances to place characters near things they can buy, whether it is a No Doubt CD or a then-gigantic retail chain (K-Mart). The writers completed the con by exploiting one’s investment in the characters and the world of the characters to sell those products. While Joey and Pacey eat K-Mart nachos together while being all cute together, the viewer rejoices in their cuteness and cannot help but think that eating K-Mart nachos would have improved the experience.

The favorite geometric shape of most individuals is the circle, and many have made it his or her own favorite metaphor. The circle of life. Time is a flat circle. The circular structure of Vladimir Nabokov’s “The Circle” and of James Joyce’s famous book of the dark. Dan Harmon’s Story Circle. Dawson did not share the same zeal for the circle as the metaphor for a life. “Life has no opposite,” he says to Joey in the series finale after Jen’s death and after an extended run of episodes that purposely returned, i.e. circled, the characters to where they began in season one. A circular narrative structure doesn’t quite serve a coming-of-age story unless the writers thought of their circle as spiritualized, like Nabokov did, and Hegel before him, because the spiritualized circle is, really, a spiral, and the circle uncoils in the spiral form, which sets the circle free. Kevin Williamson wanted to depict important first milestones in a teenager’s life: adolescent anxiety and hand holding and sweaty palms and first kisses. Kevin Williamson, naturally, killed Jen Lindley because it was the last milestone his young characters had to experience: the death of a close friend. The writers who wrote the world of Dawson’s Creek in the seasons after Williamson clearly thought of their narrative as a circular, not the spiritualized one of VN’s, or even of Dan Harmon’s story circle where a character or characters return to the same place having changed, but as Viconian wherein history repeats and recirculates, as evidenced by new Joey and new Dawson in Creek Daze; but even Williamson couldn’t resist a Viconian indulgence near the end of “…Must Come to an End” when Joey and Dawson watch her brother, Alexander, climb the ladder to his sister’s, Lily, bedroom, i.e. Dawson’s old bedroom, which suggests a Viconian cycle/circle, that Lily and Alexander will make each other miserable for the rest of their teenage years like how their older siblings made one another miserable.

The circle of storytelling in television can be a forced and wobbly thing. New writers, new showrunners, and departing creators inevitably separate a show into disparate parts. The conclusion implicit in the beginning of Dawson’s Creek happened at the end of its first season when Dawson and Joey finally kiss. Kevin Williamson completed his small, sweet story then; however, television, like evil, goes on, no matter what, as Holland Manners explains to a broken and soon hopeless Angel in the hell-avator in “Reprise”. The circle, like a circular pool of water in a rainstorm, can expand, and behind-the-scenes drama between cast and crew can, and does, further complicate any semblance of organic and coherent storytelling. The series Williamson returned to end in early 2003 was no longer his and no longer existed. Oddly, Dawson’s Creek ended twice in season six. The WB asked Williamson to return and complete his dream, but his return effectively cemented season six’s irrelevancy. Not even the series creator and screenwriter of the two-part series finale watched the previous twenty-two episodes. For him, it did not exist. He simply carried his five characters five years forward in time, from where he last left them, to continue a story interrupted by his departure after season two.

The writers of season six tried to complete the circle as early as the sixth season premiere when Joey and Dawson finally sleep together, and, again, in the original finale to the series. The original finale returned the gang to Capeside where they helped Dawson finish his movie, which is a recreation of the first episode of the series. A deluge of bad storylines, ancillary characters, and clear cast disinterest fills the space between the beginning and end of season six. The writers only returned to the eternal themes of the show after the cast chose not to renew their contracts for a seventh season. The viewer can tell when the shift occurs: Pacey and Joey spend a night together locked in a local K-Mart and remember that they were in love for an entire season of television and were the most beloved and popular couple in the show. They then realized that they might have a future together. From there, the writers returned the characters to their past. Dawson and Pacey slowly regain their lost friendship until Pacey, like he always does in Dawson’s perspective, screws up. Dawson visits Mr. Gold’s film class, the same film class he once schemed his way into during season one, for one day as a guest speaker and a Hollywood director (yes, at nineteen years old, Dawson became a Hollywood director). Joey finally traveled to Paris six years after Dawson convinced her to stay in Capeside for him.

The writers had no choice but to return the story to its past when they knew they needed to end the story, because what the show became meant nothing, and what it was was nothing, and the only way to restore resonance and meaning for the viewers was to return it to the time when it meant something to them, to the time of the Williamson/Greg Berlanti years, before everyone gave up and before the show lost itself when it moved the central setting to Boston and left Capeside behind.

The series finally ends outside Capeside — in New York City and in Los Angeles — where Joey and Pacey, and Dawson, now live their lives, as it should have, because they’re adults, and Capeside represents all the wonderful trappings of a fantastical adolescence that will only dissolve after time, that probably could've never really existed except in one's fanciful nostalgia. The story should’ve left Dawson and Joey silhouetted in one another’s arms, in Capeside, in “Coda”, as they face an uncertain future away from Capeside and from each other and from all the safe things and people they’ve known their whole lives.