Over this past weekend I was horrible sick with what was probably the "stomach flu". My wife is now. I'll write more on that latter.
Anyhow, I woke up in a bad state (I'll spare the details) and spent most of the weekend on the sofa, falling asleep.
A lost weekend.
Anyhow, my wife had Dawson's Creek on, which was on as one of the major actors, James Van Der Beek recently tragically died of colon cancer, something I relatively recently dodged the bullet on myself. FWIW, quite a few actors who were on the series have passed away, although he's the youngest (although barely so) to do so. It was a tragic death.
Dawson's Creek, 1998-2003, sucks.
The question would be why I put it up here at all, and I don't have that much of a good reason, but it reminds me of how television shows featuring teenagers of recent years fit a pattern. The other one is One Tree Hill.
Their nighttime soap operas, but they're bad, and at worst, perverted.
All the characters, even the supposedly poor ones, are fantastically wealthy living in really good conditions. They have nearly unlimited access to wealth that most middle class families in the real world struggle for and their lives are more or less unhindered by their parents, who are portrayed as a sort of older siblings, even in their appearance. Nobody in this world has been worn down by age and responsibilities. They're all beautiful. There's now an ugly duckling girls or awkward boy amongst them. Their entire lives involve endless love triangles, and at least in Dawson's Creek's case, statutory rape. They're maudlin in the extreme.
All in all, they're a really weird look at the teenage years of Americans, and its weirder than people want to look back at teenagers that way. It says something about our society, and not in a good way. That millions of adults would follow a series that deals, at least in part, with sexual encounters of minors, is weird. Dramas, and comedies, focusing on youth have always been a thing, but not ones that focus on youth as well funded adults lusting or longing for each other.
As a complaint about television scripts, I suppose, it's interesting that television likes to keep a couple that should obviously be a couple nearly being a couple for years, and then conclude with them not being a couple. This can be a legitimate dramatic element, as in the Western drama Wil Penny, but if its going to be done it ought to serve some purpose. In television dramas, it simply tends not to. The Wonder Years, well worth watching, provides another example.
On material details, this is set on the Eastern Seaboard which I don't know much about, but nearly 100% of the people depicted are white, which I don't think realistic. Maybe my view of the Eastern Seaboard is off, however. Made when it was, an obligatory sympathetically portrayed homosexual couple is included.
One thing I'll add to all of this is that this entire series' view seems summed up by its horrible theme song, which wasn't written for it, I Don't Want To Wait by Paula Cole. Sung in such a muttering style that it hard to understand, the song is a lament that the singer's grandparents had to endure World War Two and her grandfather came back physically and mentally scarred by the war, and then seemingly implied that they had not lived their lives for the moment. The lyrics are, in part:
o open up your morning light
And say a little prayer for I
You know that if we are to stay alive
Then see the peace in every eye
She had two babies, one was six months, one was three
In the war of '44
Every telephone ring, every heartbeat stinging
When she thought it was God calling her
Oh, would her son grow to know his father?
I don't want to wait for our lives to be over
I want to know right now what will it be
I don't want to wait for our lives to be over
Will it be yes or will it be sorry?
He showed up all wet on the rainy front step
Wearing shrapnel in his skin
And the war he saw lives inside him still
It's so hard to be gentle and warm
The years pass by, and now, he has granddaughters
I don't want to wait for our lives to be over
I want to know right now what will it be
I don't want to wait for our lives to be over
Will it be yes or will it be...
The I deserve happiness right now and can obtain it without repercussion sort of view was a common one with younger people at the time, memoirs of Gen X. Indeed, the show is sort of Gen X Romeo and Juliet and the ballad fits that. That sort of vapid view has really passed into the the rear view mirror and younger generations don't have it, been afflicted, as they are, by the real world. The shallowness of the views expressed in Dawson's Creek, One Tree Hill, and Beverly Hills 90210 help explain the big turn towards inward conservatism in the generations that have followed.
Anyhow, just skip this and watch 5-25-77 instead.
