Dawson's Creek: Season 1 DVD

Stars:

Yes, it's off the air, and the only way that you, the fan, can re-live the cheesy magic is via DVD collections, this one being the first.

I happened upon Dawson's Creek as a semi-watcher (I could often not remember when it was on) in the latter seasons of the show, when plotlines began to, as they say, jump the shark with alarming regularity. Now before we continue with this review we need to calibrate the reader's expectations by disclaiming that of course we know, the whole show was terribly stupid.

Way back in Season 1 (and limited in fact to Season 1) Dawson was actually the main character of the show. This is before the producers discovered James Van Der Beek to be a pompous, inflexible, bad-haired actor who would shortly become uninteresting and prove to be an obstacle to what became The Katie Holmes Worship Hour for the remaining seasons.

In Season 1, Dawson is acting like a self-centered, immature tool per usual, but his plots actually impel him to interact with other characters, which ceased to happen in season three and beyond (I can't speak for season 2, as I have never seen it). For this reason, I recommend Season 1, the DVD, if only to answer the question "Why is this show called 'Dawson's Creek?' for befuttled latecomers like myself.

In fact, the whole of season 1 is pretty much a different show, which seemed to center around a particular idea (like a lot of shows in their initial season, before the desparation of subsequent seasons causes the plot to twist and mutate into Melrosian machinations). The idea here being that childhood friends face the inevitable teen romance and then suffer lots of pouting and second guessing to the tune of mincing pop music. This portrayal is competently pulled off here in season 1, before Dawson took his plunging nose-dive into tool-dom, and Joey began to seduce muggers and college professors by acting really bitchy and dying the lower half of her hair a hideous shade of orange.

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