Adolescence, as life phases go, isn’t particularly straightforward to idealize. Dawson’s Creekalthough, discovered a means. The ’90s-era cleaning soap opera, disguised as a gauzy coming-of-age drama, gave us the fictional Capeside, Massachusetts, a telegenically rustic hamlet populated by telegenically precocious youngsters—chief amongst them Dawson Leery, a dreamy filmmaker within the making, who spent six TV seasons angsting and aching his means into the hearts of the present’s younger viewers.
Dawson was sturdy and delicate in equal measure. He was a totally good man in a present that refused to deal with that standing as an insult. He was as totally fantastical because the collection that shared his identify. However the character labored—and the present labored with him—as a result of, towards all odds, he appeared so heat and actual. That’s principally as a result of he was performed by James Van Der Beek.
Van Der Beek died yesterday on the age of 48, after asserting in 2024 that he had been identified with Stage 3 colorectal most cancers. The actor leaves behind a big household—he and his spouse, Kimberly, had six kids—and a legacy that extends far past the character who made him, for a sure technology of TV viewers, an icon.
Dawson’s ended its run in 2003; Van Der Beek, having achieved one thing firstly of his profession that almost all actors spend their lives pursuing, might need gone on to hunt profitable reprisals of his well-known function. As an alternative, for essentially the most half, the actor left Capeside, selecting work that demonstrated his exceptional versatility. He did comedy and drama and romance. He did movie and TV. He performed Jonathan “Mox” Moxon, the stressed quarterback of Varsity Blues. And Elijah Mundo, the FBI agent of CSI: Cyber. And Matt Bromley, the oversexed and undershamed government of Pose.
His finest function, although, discovered Van Der Beek enjoying himself.
Don’t Belief the B—- in House 23an ABC sitcom whose awkward title belied its straightforward appeal, ran from 2012 to 2014. A gender-flipped and gimlet-eyed replace of The Odd Couplethe present starred Krysten Ritter as Chloe, a New Yorker with a behavior of ruining her roommates’ lives, and Dreama Walker as June, the wide-eyed, Midwestern-bred girl who will get caught in Chloe’s chaos. However the collection additionally starred, delightfully, James Van Der Beek, who made common, scene-stealing appearances as Chloe’s finest pal—the actor James Van Der Beek.
TV James is an actor and celeb who’s self-conscious and useless in equal measure: a Hollywood stereotype let unfastened on the streets of New York. TV James carries shiny headshots round with him to distribute, magnanimously, to wayward followers. TV James is engaged in a long-running and passionately petty feud with the actor Dean Cain (performed, sure, by the actor Dean Cain). TV James, desirous to de-Dawson his private model, lends his identify to a line of absurdly skinny denims (tagline: “Put your cheeks in a Beek!”). TV James can consider no increased aspiration than a seasonal look on Dancing With the Stars.
The actor who performs himself is an age-old trope. Since properly earlier than Larry David got here alongside, celebrities have been breaking their very own life’s fourth wall and discovering comedy among the many wreckage. Van Der Beek, throughout his Dawson’s run, made a self-referential look within the movie Jay and Silent Bob Strike Again—his personal early try, maybe, to de-Dawson himself.
In House 23although, he discovered new verve within the outdated joke. Having ascended into the sitcom’s semi-fictional type, he created a personality who was prickly and smarmy and needy and whiny, and thus richly emblematic of Hollywood then and now. He mocked his trade. He mocked his fame. He mocked himself. (TV James’s overzealous preparations for Dancing With the Stars are, looking back, all of the funnier, and all of the deeper, as a result of Van Der Beek the individual finally appeared on the present.) He remade himself as a human punch line, gamely and, in the long run, successfully—enjoying somebody who, via all his flaws, turned a intelligent however in any other case standard-issue sitcom right into a satire.
TV James, like Dawson, is extra resonant than he has any proper to be. On paper—as scripted—he’s aggressively un-relatable. (“I’ve an excessive amount of cash,” he grouses at one level; “my pockets’s so thick that it’s hurting my again!”). On-screen, although, his plight reverberates. TV James, like Dawson, is trapped in arrested improvement, perpetually caught between adolescence and maturity. Beneath his foolishness, he’s consigned to an all-too-relatable destiny: He’s not sure learn how to reconcile the individual he was with the individual he needs to turn out to be.
All of the farce, in that means, hints at tragedy. And it does so as a result of Van Der Beek, enjoying and mocking himself, additionally humanized himself. He re-created the magic that made Dawson’s Creek a cultural touchpoint. The present, in exaggerating adolescence—in remaking that consequential part as a fantasy and a melodrama—additionally managed to honor it. It took youngsters critically. Van Der Beek, twisting his exceptional life into a chunk of comedy, pulled the identical form of trick. Poking enjoyable at himself, he discovered one thing not solely actual—but additionally true.
