James Van Der Beek VALERIE MACON/AFP via Getty Images Share on Facebook Share on X Google Preferred Share to Flipboard Show additional share options Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on Reddit Share on Tumblr Share on Whats App Send an Email Print the Article Post a Comment Logo text One of my most fiercely held television positions - one that has been known to elicit gasps of incredulity and even horror when I share it - is that Joey (Katie Holmes) and Dawson (James Van Der Beek) belonged together on Dawson's Creek. This is not a traditionally defensible affiliation. If Dawson's Creek wasn't even Team Dawson - and it SURELY was not - what kind of viewer would latch onto a show's original 'ship and cling to it long after the storytellers themselves relinquished their hold on the pairing? It was clear from very early on that the real chemistry was between Joey and Pacey, dooming poor Dawson to subplots related to his insufferable artistry, a variety of short-term romantic relationships and the grief over his father's death - a tragic ice cream-related accident - that spawned the meme that has become one of the WB favorite's largest cultural legacies. Related Stories News James Van Der Beek's Final Posted Photo Was a Heartbreaking Tribute to His Daughter TV Chad Michael Murray, Jennifer Garner, Sarah Michelle Gellar and More Pay Tribute to James Van Der Beek: "Inspired Us to Be Better in All Ways" It was never James Van Der Beek's fault that Dawson's Creek became a show in which the main character was simultaneously the titular role, the avatar for the series' creator and...the fellow whose happiness many viewers rooted against. Not me, though. I was Team Dawson. I'm not a hugely earnest person myself, but I appreciated his earnestness, just as I appreciate the earnestness that Van Der Beek brought to Varsity Blues, a film in which I well and truly believed that Van Der Beek's Jonathan "Mox" Moxon wanted no part of the life his football-obsessed father wanted for him. Dawson just wanted to be the next Spielberg! Mox just wanted to avoid the temptation of whipped cream bikinis and go to Brown! Why was this so hard for people to understand? Over the decades that followed, it became increasingly clear that the largest part of why I was Team Dawson related not to that character's qualities, such as they were, but to the qualities I sensed in Van Der Beek himself - qualities he confirmed time and time again over the subsequent stages of his career. Van Der Beek died this week at 48. Fuck cancer. Most tributes will remember him as Dawson Leery with a dash of Mox. The Dawson Crying Face will live on as long as social media exists, as will his square-jawed commitment to throwing a football through a tire. But spare a thought for the James Van Der Beek I respected most, an actor whose work was far weirder, funnier and more attuned to his own onscreen identity than the white-knight roles that made him famous. That guy was always there. Go back to his appearance hosting Saturday Night Live in January 1999, timed more to the release of Varsity Blues than Dawson's Creek, since Saturday Night Live has rarely embraced that breed of TV stardom. The joke of his monologue - delivered in an ill-fitting suit that might have been purchased for a bar mitzvah, confirmation or graduation - was that SNL announcer Don Pardo was obsessed with Van Der Beek, giving him a gift of underwear and praising him for being "so clean and untainted." Though Thomas Mann's Death in Venice was an inspiration - one surely well-known to fans of both Saturday Night Live and Dawson's Creek - the interaction more directly mirrored the relationship between John Hurt's Giles and the former teen idol played by Jason Priestley, another star of a beloved YA show whose character was both the hero and a bit insufferable, in the loose Death in Venice adaptation, Love and Death on Long Island. What the monologue and the rest of a solidly performed episode - Joey (Katie Holmes) would host two years later - made clear was that Van Der Beek had a good sense of his fame and the limitations of teen (he was nearly 22 at the time) stardom. From the beginning, he was eager to wink and nod at an audience he hoped would follow him long beyond the end of Dawson's Creek. He played Dawson Leery for a three-second cameo in Scary Movie and then was very funny in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, playing a version of James Van Der Beek eager to redefine his image by playing Jay in the movie Jay and Silent Bob are determined to halt. But then he actually accomplished some of that image redefinition as the ultra-intense Sean Bateman in The Rules of Attraction, and in a killer role in a Criminal Minds episode airing after the Super Bowl in 2007. (He also played an alternative version of Dawson Leary in a One Tree Hill arc that I'll do him the honor of not discussing further.) Television put Van Der Beek in a box he spent several post-Dawson's Creek years trying to break out of,