Inside the Thrilling, Chaotic Writers’ Room of Dawson’s Creek

In the spring of 2001, Greg Berlanti—then working as the show-runner of Dawson’s Creek—was on a mission. “There hadn’t been a gay kiss that was romantic on primetime TV,” Berlanti explains. “There had been joke kisses, but there was never a romantic kiss between two characters, let alone two high-schoolers.” So Berlanti pushed his home network, the WB, to air an episode in which the teen drama’s only gay character, Jack, shared a kiss with another boy. He had to threaten to quit in order for the network to get fully on board with the idea—and even then, the WB was very specific about what the scene could and could not show.

“The network said they wanted it filmed across the street from a very, very wide shot,” says Gina Fattore, one of Berlanti’s writers at the time. “I was the one who was on set to produce it. Greg said to me, ‘I want this to be a great kiss. I want there to be close-ups, and I want it to feel romantic.’”

“Gina was calling with spy updates, telling me, ‘O.K., I think I’ve got them 10 feet away from each other,’” Berlanti says. “And I was like, ‘That’s nothing! They need to be closer!’ But we got our kiss.”

That battle was one of many behind-the-scenes struggles and triumphs on Dawson’s Creek, which launched 20 years ago this month, in late January 1998. The show introduced viewers to a whip-smart cast, especially four core actors who became major stars—James Van Der Beek, Michelle Williams, Katie Holmes, and Joshua Jackson—as they navigated first kisses, sweaty palms, and multiple heartbreaks onscreen.

Offscreen, Dawson also drew together a group of first-time television writers, who rallied to script the coming-of-age story while navigating their own share of backstage drama and creative growing pains. Those new voices would go on to become a generation of big-name screenwriters, directors, and producers—many of whom liken their time on Dawson’s Creek to a boot camp and a film school, all rolled into one.

“It was like being tossed into the deep end,” says Fattore (Gilmore Girls), one of the future industry stars who got her start on Dawson’s Creek—along with Berlanti (Arrow), Tom Kapinos (Californication), Jenny Bicks (Sex and the City), and Dana Baratta (Jessica Jones). We spoke with all of them about writing the teen drama, the show’s highs and lows, and—of course—Team Dawson vs. Team Pacey.

Executive producer Paul Stupin wasn’t looking for candidates with a lot of television experience when he began staffing the Dawson’s Creek writers’ room—or any TV experience at all, for that matter. “We were this small show on the WB,” Stupin says. “It’s not like established television writers were lining up for the job.” Instead, he filled the room with young, energetic staffers, people who could bring humor and emotional depth to the page. They’d join Kevin Williamson, the show’s creator, who was fresh off the success of his horror hit Scream.

The writers were flown between L.A. and the show’s filming location in Wilmington, North Carolina, where many learned how to work on a set for the first time. “We had such fun and learned on the fly,” Baratta recalls. “We were kind of under the radar. There wasn’t a huge amount of notes [from the network] in the beginning.”

The show’s cast also managed to fly under the radar—for a little while, at least. “They didn’t understand that the show was exploding because they were all sequestered in Wilmington,” Baratta says. “Then, all of a sudden, they were everywhere.”

Similarly, the writers’ room ran smoothly and productively at first. “I was testing my writing in ways that I hadn’t done before,” recalls Bicks. “They wanted you to come in with your own stories and your own experiences and your own voice.”

The series was a cultural phenomenon, drawing scores of die-hard teenage fans and defining the WB as a home for adolescent angst. Then—just as the show hit its third season—everything started to fall apart. Williamson left Dawson, along with most of the writing staff from the previous seasons—the staffers who really understood how to capture Williamson’s unique, hyper-verbal voice.

The series’s new show-runner, Alex Gansa, was an accomplished writer who would go on to produce Homeland and 24—but he didn’t quite get what made Dawson feel like Dawson. The season kicked off with a story line about a new character named Eve, a temptress straight out of film noir who seduced Dawson and stirred up trouble in his fictional sleepy town.

“I had never worked in television,” Kapinos, who joined the staff in the third season, says. “I showed up on the first day, and almost quit. I didn’t really understand the stories they were talking about, and it didn’t seem like the show I had watched for two seasons. I don’t think I said a word for about six weeks.” He singles out the Eve arc as a “colossal mistake.”

Meanwhile, the actors were also unhappy with their story lines—especially an arc that involved Jen and Pacey hooking up—and they went straight to the network to complain. After a production shutdown, Gansa was out. The network then tapped 28-year-old Berlanti, one of the few writers who stuck around after Williamson made his exit, to be Dawson’s new show-runner.

“It was a daunting task at the time,” Berlanti says. “It was only my second year in television, and the show wasn’t doing too hot. I really felt like this thing was going to fail—and I was going to be the one holding it.”

But just as the writers’ room had hit peak levels of desperation, Berlanti pitched a winning idea. Joey and Pacey would kiss for the first time—throwing a wrench into the Dawson-Pacey-Joey friendship, and creating endless fodder for future plots.

“Ultimately, it was kind of the fanboy in me that was like, well, what would I want to see?” Berlanti says. “I always loved the Camelot-esque story of two close friends and the love story that comes between them.”

It helped, notes Fattore, that Jackson and Holmes, who also dated off-screen, had natural chemistry. Plus, she adds, Van Der Beek and Jackson weren’t particularly getting along at the time, so the writers began to consciously avoid putting them in scenes together.

The writers’ room was reinvigorated—and so were the actors. Fattore remembers the excitement in the room during the table read for “The Longest Day,” an episode she wrote that centered around Dawson discovering Joey and Pacey’s romance.

“Everything had been so tumultuous and I knew that the actors didn’t trust us,” Fattore says. “The feeling in the room was that the cast was experiencing the script the way that we in the writers’ room intended for it to be experienced. It’s still one of the most rewarding creative experiences of my life.”

Ask the writers what they took away from their time on Dawson, and they’ll tell you it was an education. Berlanti learned not just how to run a show, but how to convince a network to take a chance on a groundbreaking story line—that seminal kiss between Jack and his crush, Tobey. Even the series’s lowest points came with surprising upsides. “If you enter a show that runs too smoothly, you don’t learn much,” Kapinos says. “But when you enter a show that’s a dysfunctional mess, you get to learn by doing.”

Kapinos went on to create Californication, a series about a recovering sex addict, where he incorporated several lessons he’d taken away from the teen drama. “I learned a lot about creating moments. That’s all you really remember from shows and movies—scenes and moments,” he says. “Californication and Dawson’s Creek are different, but they’re both fractured, dysfunctional fairy tales about people working stuff out.”

For Bicks, Dawson was an opportunity to stretch her limits. ”It was a disarmingly simple show, and yet incredibly complicated,” she says. “You knew who all these characters were, but you wanted to constantly surprise the viewers about who they could be. That challenged me to take more chances.”

There were, of course, a few moments the writers would prefer to forget during their Dawson tenures. Berlanti regrets an episode that involved Joey wearing a wire to implicate her drug-dealing father. Kapinos isn’t too proud of Pacey’s random turn as a stockbroker. He’s also haunted by his decision to kill off Dawson’s father while he was eating an ice cream cone: “That was just an utter disaster, and I think it’s joked about to this day,” he says. (He’s right.)

Dawson’s Creek ended up having two finales. The first was written by Kapinos and Fattore, and showed Dawson and Pacey reconciling, Jen moving back to New York, and Joey finally traveling to Paris. It never occurred to the writers that they should pair Joey with either of her high-school sweethearts; in fact, they wanted to avoid that conclusion.

“It wasn’t a story that was important to me,” Fattore says. “She had these relationships with Pacey and Dawson, but what did she really want for herself? I don’t think that coming-of-age stories for women should be love stories.”

Later, when Fattore was working on Gilmore Girls, she’d make a strong pitch for the show’s main character, Rory, to follow Barack Obama on the campaign trail rather than marrying her college boyfriend. “I am a one-trick writer,” she says, laughing. “My trick is . . . let’s get this girl a job. We’ll worry about her romantic life later.”

But viewers who wanted the trio’s love stories neatly wrapped up needn’t have worried. The network ended up asking Williamson to return and write his own version of the finale, which Williamson set five years in the future—wrapping up with Joey and Pacey living together, happily ever after.

“We kept talking about whether it should be Dawson and Joey or Pacey and Joey,” Stupin says. “I don’t think Kevin knew himself how it was going to end when he was writing the first half of that finale. His thoughts changed as he was writing it.”

Berlanti—who helped co-write the finale—still doesn’t really see the show as a will they-won’t they romance, for his part. ”The heart of the Dawson’s Creek for me was always Dawson and Joey, in Dawson’s room, watching a movie, talking about high school,” he says. “They were meant to be soul mates, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they were meant to be partners for life. There was something so satisfying about that.”

Get Vanity Fair’s HWD NewsletterSign up for essential industry and award news from Hollywood.Full ScreenPhotos:The Most Stylish Sunglasses of the 90s