Dawson's Creek

Procter & Gamble paid for the show. Then it read the pilot.

The WB spent about $3 million selling Dawson's Creek months before January 20, 1998. Trailers ran in front of Titanic. J.Crew put the unknown kids in a catalog. A clip had already gone out to critics in summer 1997, full of frank sex talk and a teacher sleeping with a student. Procter & Gamble Productions, an original co-producer, sold its stake three months before premiere. Columnist John Leo wanted the title changed to "While Parents Cringe." The network still had notes. Joey was supposed to ask Dawson how often he masturbated. Standards and practices told Kevin Williamson to find a euphemism. Programming executive Jordan Levin later told Entertainment Weekly the line became "walk the dog." "Nobody had ever heard of that before." Advertisers still flinched at kids who talked like adults. Levin said they missed Williamson's conceit. latestnetflix.com's take is that he put adult sentences in teenage mouths instead of using a narrator., ,

Joshua Jackson almost played Dawson. Williamson loved him in the room, then decided the Mighty Ducks face was too pretty for a video-store nerd. James Van Der Beek got the title. Selma Blair was close for Joey until Katie Holmes mailed a basement tape, her mother reading Dawson's lines. Williamson told The Hollywood Reporter he saw "those eyes, those eyes just stained with loneliness" and asked her on a plane that day. She had a school play. She came two weeks later. The entire first season was shot before episode one aired. ,

The triangle was a panic pitch. Williamson quit halfway through season 2 for ABC's Wasteland. Stories ran late. Actors got pages late. Greg Berlanti, then 27, walked into the wreckage. Writer Jeffrey Stepakoff, in The Billion-Dollar Kiss, says Berlanti's save was three words. "Pacey kisses Joey." Staff argued that Joey was Dawson's girl, the franchise. Berlanti drew a triangle on the board anyway. Williamson has said they saw the chemistry in season 1, when Holmes and Jackson got soaked on a biology project and had to strip in a truck. "They had instant chemistry." Holmes and Jackson dated in real life around 1998. She told Rolling Stone she had her first love that year and that it was "so incredible and indescribable that I will treasure it always." The on-screen kiss that saved the ratings was not the original plan. It was the writers noticing the kids were already doing it. , ,

Katie freaked out. The finale moved.

Williamson came back to write the 2003 ender still Team Dawson. "I don't care how romantic things got between Joey and Pacey. It was going to be Dawson and Joey, always," he told Entertainment Weekly in 2018. He even wrote it that way. Showrunner Tom Kapinos, in Thea Glassman's Freaks, Gleeks, and Dawson's Creek, recalled Holmes's reaction. "Katie freaked out. 'I don't want to end up with Dawson.' So it got replotted, or rewritten." Producer Paul Stupin said the first hour still leans Dawson, then she weighed in for Pacey. Jackson told EW he had already cornered Williamson. "Hell no! No. No. No. That's not gonna work for me." Watch the tale of the tape, he said. Joey ended up with Pacey in New York. Dawson went to Los Angeles to meet Spielberg. Williamson later admitted that version "feels right." Years after that, Kapinos called the four leads "monstrous actors" who made writers' lives miserable once they got famous. The kids who were not allowed to say the word on the WB had, by the last script, rewritten the ending. , ,