Ok, I watched the first episode and a half of Dawson's Creek, and it is pretty much the most awful show ever created.
The first scene of the pilot features Dawson and Joey in Dawson's bedroom watching ET. They're 15. Joey goes to leave for the night, and Dawson asks why she doesn't spend the night over like they have since they were kids. Joey explains that they are changing and as hormonally fueled teens, it's probably not such a hot idea to do that any more. Dawson eventually convinces Joey to stay over, as innocently as she always has.
Now, looking at that brief description, you'd think this could be a nice beginning to an awkward coming-of-age story about lost innocence, or the arbitrary nature of growing up. The unignorable problem that rears its hideous hydra head is the dialogue: These two 15 year olds talk like they're thesaurus- and meth-fueled graduate student screenwriters. Over the course of the episode, there are words used that I'd not brave to try to spin in a conversation. There are cultural references that made me glad I was surfing IMDB while watching. In short, these "kids" don't talk like teenagers at all.
Now, after a steady diet of Buffy and <3 Veronica Mars, I've built up a healthy suspension of disbelief when it comes to precocious teenagers, and after the especially soap opera-y second season of VM (which I mostly enjoyed), I thought I'd be able to swallow Dawson's Creek easily. How wrong I was! Either the writers for this show are completely out of touch, or they're doing something over my head. Since I refuse to give up on the first season, I have formulated a reason that the show is the way it is:
I think the show is a fairl high concept deconstruction of puberty. The writers are playing a game: What would happen if you took a mid-20s to mid-30s person, injected them with the hormones of a 15 year old, gave them a bunch of plastic surgery to make them inexplicably look about 5 years older than the 15 year olds they will be portraying, and tossed them back in high school? Dawson's Creek, that's what! It's pretty much like Lost, except with high school instead of an island, and it's less dumb.
