The Dawson's Creek Episode Guide: His Leading Lady

The second season of Dawson’s Creek represents its highest rank among network television series during its entire run. Though the average audiences were slightly smaller than its premiere season (an average of 6.6 million viewers in the first, down to 5.4 million in the second), it managed to tick up a few spots to be the 119th most watched show on broadcast TV that season. That’s not much, but it was progress for the WB, a still-fledgling network that was slowly grafting its identity to the teens who starred on their series and made up the bulk of their core demographic. Dawson’s Creek was still not as big as 7th Heaven, which had its biggest season ever that same year, but it had captured the imagination of the zeitgeist in a major way.

That success turned its core cast into stars, and in the hiatus between seasons one and two they each cast their lines into the also-ascendent teen movie market. By 1999 (still one of the best movie years ever), they were all on big screens: Michelle Williams starred alongside also-popping Kirsten Dunst in the political send-up Dick; Joshua Jackson slipped into the ensemble of Cruel Intentions alongside fellow WBer Sarah Michelle Gellar); Katie Holmes somehow starred in both the kinetic caper movie Go and the controversial teen thriller Teaching Mrs. Tingle.

But James Van Der Beek topped them all, leading a juvenile MTV comedy about Texas high school football called Varsity Blues. JVDB played hyper-literate back-up quarterback Jon Moxon, who is thrust into the spotlight on his squad following a devastating injury to beloved QB1 Lance Harbor (Paul Walker) and butts heads with tyrannical coach Bud Kilmer (Jon Voight). It’s a deeply cynical and broadly misogynistic movie, but it does have a lot of for-its-time charm with a fun ensemble (including Scott Caan, Amy Smart, Ali Larter, and Ron Lester) and feels like the halfway point between ‘80s jock movies and Friday Night Lights. It made $52 million on a budget of $16 million and was the number one movie in America for two solid weeks despite its tepid critical reception (in his two star review, Roger Ebert liked parts of it but complained “scenes work, but they don’t pile up and build momentum,” though he also called Van Der Beek “convincing and likable”). It really felt like JVDB was being set up for a proper movie star career, but Varsity Blues is essentially his big screen peak.

Dawson’s Creek is partially to blame. Because of the demands of the 22-episode-season shooting schedule, TV stars in that era tended to have time for one project between their main gig, and if that project fell flat, there wasn’t ample opportunity to do another until the next break came along. So despite the momentum he could have built off of Varsity Blues, Van Der Beek doesn’t have another chance at the cinema until 2001’s forgotten Texas Rangers (which was barely released) and 2002’s The Rules of Attraction (which he’s great in but was seen by next to nobody). By then Creek had faded from its zeitgeisty heights, and JVDB was in the desert for a while until television re-invested in him (his self-effacing turn on Don’t Trust the Bitch in Apartment 23 was fun, and he’s excellent on FX’s Pose).

My long-winded point is that Van Der Beek is good at it, even when Dawson’s Creek forces him to carry the burden of being the show’s unintentional villain. But there are a bunch of scenes in “His Leading Lady” that really allow him to shine and show off his ability to process the often narrative-crushing angst that provides its sturdy base. When the hour opens, Dawson is acting like he’s really over Joey and the two of them are able to get along without any of the drama that erupted from their brief relationship and subsequent break-up. But Dawson is lying to himself, and as he dives deeper into the production of his autobiographical second feature Creek Times (a truly miserable title), he finds himself struggling with the idea that Joey rejected him.

But rather than wallow in juvenile mind games, Dawson puts his heart on his sleeve in the name of his art, and manages to express all his feelings while helping his two stars break down their characters. Oversexed popular kid Chris (Jason Behr) is playing the Dawson stand-in Wade, but the big addition to the cast this week is collegiate drama student Devon (Rachel Leigh Cook), who Dawson first encounters as a nude model in one of Joey’s art classes. Devon spends most of the episode coyly stalking Joey and attempting to get inside her head for a purely Method performance. Cook is a welcome revelation, adding just the right amount of guest star spunk while still seamlessly slipping into scenes with the main ensemble, deftly mixing it up with Holmes and providing just a slightly skewed entry point into Van Der Beek’s psychology (even going as far as quoting her psych professor multiple times).

Maybe Cook’s verve is what makes Van Der Beek stand out in this episode, though the best moment comes between Dawson and Joey late in the run time. We’ve seen scenes like this before, where our two star-crossed lovers lay out their feelings for one another, and it can often feel like we’re running in circles (Dawson, especially seems never to be able to grow after these encounters). But though they’re both pulling heavily from their storage lockers of teenage angst, there’s something more authentic about everything this time around. Dawson comes clean on the fact that he’s not over her (a reality he insisted on in the cold open), and Joey admits that she too has been torn about by the tumult in their relationship. She knows that, somehow, they’ll be connected and their lives intertwined forever (an idea Devon suggests to her earlier on in the episode), but they cannot help but move on from one another. It’s the type of over-the-top teen drama kid nonsense that feels heightened but is actually right on the money. I went through a protracted break-up with my own high school girlfriend, and we had been such a huge part of each other’s lives up to that point that it seemed impossible we weren’t bound to one another for all time. (I have not heard from her in literal decades, and I hope she’s doing well.) It’s the subject of countless emo songs and endless bad poetry, but this type of thing wouldn’t be a cliché if it wasn’t true.

Also:

-This episode aired Wednesday, February 3 1999, the week after Varsity Blues was dethroned at the top of the box office. The new number one that week? She’s All That, starring Rachel Leigh Cook (and Paul Walker again!.

-Somehow, there are two huge music cues in this episode that are preserved from the original broadcast. The first is Barenaked Ladies’ “It’s All Been Done,” one of the lesser singles from their chart-conquering album Stunt (that’s the one with “One Week” on it) that scores the “we’re making a movie!” montage. The other is Bruce Springsteen’s “Sad Eyes,” a song originally written and recorded for the Human Touch sessions back in 1990 but shelved until it appeared on the career-spanning b-sides box Tracks (and was also the sorta-single from the compilation 18 Tracks that came out a little while after as a way of hooking more casual fans). “Sad Eyes” is a great low-stakes Springsteen tune, and it actually gets used twice in the episode: first as the soundtrack to Pacey trying to win back Andie, and then later over the closing shot of Dawson standing by himself on his film set watching Joey and Jack walk away.

-Oh yeah, Andie and Pacey broke up in this episode! But it only lasts for like one commercial break, so it hardly counts. Andie is upset that Pacey is badgering her about taking Xanax, and I would love to know what the general consensus was about anti-depressants circa ’99, because I don’t think anybody would really care if this script was written in 2021.

-Though the primary plot brings everybody together to work on Dawson’s movie, there is something of a b-plot involving Jen’s flirtation with a dude named Ty (Eddie Mills). He asks Jen out and she thinks they’re going to a cool party but TWIST it’s actually Bible study among some teens.

-Jack asks Joey why Devon makes her so bent out of shape, and Joey tosses off a great line: “She’s too short to play me.” (For the record, Katie Holmes is listed as 5’9” while RLC clocks in at a relatively diminutive 5’2”)