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Dawson's Creek is really starting to cook. I don't know if you watch the show, but it's about four incredibly attractive teenagers facing new aspects of their lives and bodies in completely incredulous, often touching, and sometimes laughable ways. This is the show featuring the 15-year-old guy losing his virginity to his 35-year-old English teacher. Very open about sex, and very titillating.
Anyway, there have been some fine moments since the series premiere, but tonight's hour-long installment of Dawson's Creek has to be the best ever. It's one of the finest hours of television I've seen in a long time, I think. The level of dramatic manipulation reached such heights that it ceased to be manipulative and truly involved the viewer. Creek has been barreling non-stop towards tonight's episode with a few hot subplots that you knew had to come to a head soon, or your TV would explode with tension.
And come to a head they did. Dawson's mother revealed to his father that she had been having an affair with her co-anchor on the local news. Pasey and his "girlfriend" Ms. Jacobs narrowly escaped discovery, and Pasey narrowly escaped being shot by his own brother. Dawson confronted his inner turmoil over the gnawing issue of his girlfriend Jen's overt sexuality and previous promiscuity (leading to the show's best line, from Jen: "I was sexualized too early." SEXUALIZED?! Sounds like something from a bad porno). Through it all, a deadly hurricane raged outside the house, trapping the characters within and adding an extra layer of dramatic tension.
Why is this show so aggresively tense? Because the writer/creator behind it is Kevin Williamson, the screenwriter of "Scream" and "Scream 2." For Williamson, everything must MOVE constantly forward. The same biting wit (laid on a bit too thick) and constant motion are in Creek as they are in the "Scream" films. It's drama that moves so fast that viewers have no time to think, only time to feel. I think that's Williamson's goal: to force emotion down our throats with heavy doses of wit. In doing so, he's creating some of the most relentlessly riveting drama on TV today.
Boy, that sounded like a TV Guide article, didn't it? If everything goes well in my life, hopefully someday I'll be writing TV Guide articles.