An oral history of the Dawson crying GIF and its outsized legacy – Vox.com

Youve seen the clip: James Van Der Beek dissolving into exquisitely artificial tears, his lustrous blond hair blowing in the creekside breeze as his face crumples like a discarded gum wrapper. Its the reaction gif of absurd sorrow, of tragedy so overwrought as to be funny. Its dawsoncrying.gif.

Crying Dawson ruled the internet comment sections of the late 00s and early 10s. Its on the Mount Rushmore of GIFs, says TV critic Sarah D. Bunting. It was, for a while, the sight that greeted you if you navigated to a broken URL on the Huffington Post. Van Der Beek himself recreated the GIF in 2011 for Funny or Die and gave it a second life. Anyone whos been even remotely online in the past decade or so knows it.

But Crying Dawson has a secret history one that most people who saw the GIF would never know.

Dawson wept in the season three finale of the angsty teen soap Dawsons Creek, one of the most ubiquitous shows of its era. The episode, True Love, aired on May 24, 2000, and his fateful tears were the culmination of a long and tortured story arc.

Dawsons had been a pop cultural flashpoint from the time it debuted in 1998. It was all 15-year-olds speaking like thesauruses and the looming threat that someone might, at any moment, have sex. 10 Things I Hate About You would immortalize it as being the show where those Dawsons River kids are always climbing in and out of each others beds, while its beautiful teen cast frolicked through the pages of the J. Crew catalog and its theme song raced across the Billboard charts. It was achingly of its moment.

By the time its third season began airing in the fall of 1999, to the extent that Dawsons Creek had a mythology, it was the story of Dawsons love affair with his best friend Joey, played by Katie Holmes. But Joey would soon fall for Dawsons other best friend, Pacey (Joshua Jackson).

And Dawson would, ultimately, tell Joey to go to Pacey. And then he would cry and cry and cry, and pop culture history would be made.

But Dawsons decision to send Joey to Pacey was not inevitable. The entire love triangle of Dawson, Joey, and Pacey was a glorified accident, the call of a group of young and raw writers, mostly in their 20s and mostly working their first TV jobs, as they tried desperately to create order out of chaos and shape one of the flagship shows of the young and hungry WB network. When their choice paid off, it would launch the careers of some of the most influential writers in television today.

And as the writers room was crafting Dawsons tears, an entire ecosystem of pop culture observers was building up around it. The TV recap site Television Without Pity began as a Dawsons Creek hate-watching site and grew from there to become a website that broke ground for the way we continue to talk about TV more than two decades later. And it was on the forums of Television Without Pity that the first and earliest GIFs of Dawson crying would pass from computer to computer.

To find out exactly how Dawson came to cry and why that moment has had such a long afterlife, I decided to talk with the writers who made him do it and with the TV recappers who would make the moment loop in GIF form across our screens forever after. Heres our cast of recurring characters.

True Love was written by four writers all still working in the TV industry and I talked to each of them. The first, Greg Berlanti, was the showrunner for Dawsons Creek when True Love aired. He would leave the series after its fourth season to create Everwood. Eventually, he would become the executive producer in charge of the TV shows of DC Comics, and he would serve as executive producer on Brothers & Sisters, Political Animals, Riverdale, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, and You. In 2018, he directed Love, Simon.

The second, Tom Kapinos, would take over as Dawsons Creek showrunner after Berlanti departed. He would go on to create Californication and Lucifer.

The third, Gina Fattore, would eventually become a co-executive producer on Dawsons Creek and is remembered by fans for writing many of the pivotal Joey-Pacey love scenes. She would go on to write for Dare Me, Better Things, UnREAL, Masters of Sex, Parenthood, Californication, and Gilmore Girls.

And the fourth, Jeffrey Stepakoff, would also become a co-executive producer on Dawsons Creek. Before he joined Dawsons, he worked on shows like The Wonder Years, and afterward, he wrote and developed Disneys Tarzan and Brother Bear. In 2007, he wrote Billion-Dollar Kiss: The Kiss That Saved Dawsons Creek and Other Adventures in TV Writing. Hes currently the head of the Atlanta-based Georgia Film Academy, which provides training for Georgians to work in the entertainment arts industry.

Meanwhile, watching and recapping every episode of Dawsons Creek were Television Without Pity cofounders Tara Ariano and Sarah D. Bunting. Their website would become the place where pop culture commenters like NPRs Linda Holmes and Go Fug Yourselfs Jessica Morgan would cut their teeth as writers and it would be where the rest of the internet, including Pulitzer-winning TV critic Emily Nussbaum, learned how to talk about television.

But in 1998, all of that was just beginning. Here is the secret history of how a beloved but mediocre show almost fell apart, pulled itself together instead, and ended up accidentally creating contemporary pop culture in the process. Here is the story of dawsoncrying.gif.

Dawsons Creek premiered on January 20, 1998, and the fledgling WB promoted it hard. This new show, the network had decided, was going to be the show that defined the WB. It would create the network brand of beautiful angsty teenagers maybe having sex in beautiful nostalgic Americana landscapes.

Season one was not an unmitigated critical success a New York Times review called Dawsons Creek a lesson in the dangers of overhype but it was a sensation. It was the new show that everyone had to talk about. Which meant, for one of the first times in TV history, it was the new show that everyone had to talk about on the internet.

Greg Berlanti, Dawsons Creek showrunner: I was working on a movie idea with [Dawsons Creek creator] Kevin Williamson. And in the midst of that, he said, I want to show you this TV show Im working on. He popped in a VHS tape, and I watched the pilot of Dawsons Creek.

Sarah D. Bunting, cofounder of Television Without Pity: My cofounder Tara Ariano and I met on a bulletin board about Beverly Hills 90210 in the mid-90s and became bulletin board friends. We read these recaps, which were called wrap-ups, by Danny Drennan. And we then just started chatting offline.

And then Dawsons Creek premiered.

Greg Berlanti, Dawsons Creek showrunner: Initially, it seemed to me a little weird that the characters all spoke like adults. But over time, I sort of fell in love with the fact that they had this kind of heightened language that was their own, but their emotions and all of the things that they were going through still made them very much teenagers. That tension, you know, I really liked.

Tara Ariano, cofounder of Television Without Pity: None of the teens sounded like teens. They just all sounded like characters on a TV show. They were very hyperverbal. That became the charm of the show and what people liked about it; that it was this heightened reality. It wasnt a vrit style.

That was annoying to me at the time, but ultimately, Dawson was a problem. Dawson was just such a pill.

Greg Berlanti, Dawsons Creek showrunner: Kevin asked me to come and work on the second season of the show as a staff writer in television for the first time. And he had been so good to me and had really kick-started my entire career. And even though I wasnt initially planning on working in TV, it sounded fun. So I did it.

Sarah D. Bunting, cofounder of Television Without Pity: We started writing these lengthy screeds on the bulletin boards and then someone suggested that we start our own wrap-up about Dawsons Creek. Possibly so that we would shut the fuck up and let them go back to talking like normal people. But possibly because they thought it would be a good idea, which it turned out to be.

Tara Ariano, cofounder of Television Without Pity: My husband David T. Cole is a web designer, so he made us a site called the Dawsons Wrap, and we started doing recaps. It did well enough in its first year that, after that, we went back and added a bunch of other shows. That became Mighty Big TV, and then that became Television Without Pity. And Dawson was our flagship show.

Greg Berlanti, Dawsons Creek showrunner: I remember us all of us gathering around the computer to be like, Oh, theyre writing about us on the internet. This must be nice! And then realizing that, no, most of what people write about you on the internet is not very nice.

Sarah D. Bunting, cofounder of Television Without Pity: That was the idea: that Dawsons Creek we were very unfair to it, Im sure was trying to be something and failing. And it also seemed to be oblivious to what it actually did do well.

I give it credit: It learned. It developed an intelligence about itself. And crying Dawson is Exhibit A.

As Dawsons Creek ended its second season, series creator Kevin Williamson departed the show, along with most of the original writers room. With a skeleton staff, the new Dawsons Creek struggled to find its voice. Showrunners cycled in and out of the writers room, and ratings plummeted. The TV show that the WB had built its brand around just two years earlier was now in danger of cancellation.

Greg Berlanti, Dawsons Creek showrunner: At the end of season two, Kevin left, and I think every other writer on staff either left or was let go by the studio. So I was the only remaining writer from previous seasons that was on the staff at the top of season three.

Gina Fattore, Dawsons Creek co-executive producer: It was indescribably weird in retrospect. The first day of season three in the writers room, only Greg Berlanti had ever written an episode of Dawsons Creek before. And even he didnt go all the way back to season one.

Tom Kapinos, Dawsons Creek showrunner: I realized pretty early on that the things we were talking about in the room didnt really bear any response to the show I had watched for two years. I remember getting this feeling like, this seems like were headed for some kind of a disaster. But I didnt know what I was doing. I assumed this was just TV.

Greg Berlanti, Dawsons Creek showrunner: We were having some ratings problems at the top of the season. I went off to make a movie, and I came back, and the network was making some changes to the folks that were above me, who I quite liked.

Tom Kapinos, Dawsons Creek showrunner: We had this infamous femme fatale storyline, which we hit a wall with. And then we also hit a wall with this storyline where Pacey and Jen were going to embark on a casual fuck-buddy relationship. I guess somewhere around episode eight, the network flipped out.

Gina Fattore, Dawsons Creek co-executive producer: Now that people dont even make those long seasons of television so much anymore, I look back and I can see how there was this rhythm to the year, and it was exhausting. Especially that season. We had a production shutdown around Thanksgiving.

Tom Kapinos, Dawsons Creek showrunner: We just had to change course. And I think Berlanti just sort of was like, Okay, this is what the show is going to be.

Greg Berlanti, Dawsons Creek showrunner: The studio and the network came to me and said, What would you do?

Sarah D. Bunting, cofounder of Television Without Pity: It seemed as though, perhaps because Kevin Williamson had left, the rest of the team maybe felt a little bit freer to let the show become what it wanted to become. Which was not a show about Dawson.

Greg Berlanti, Dawsons Creek showrunner: I had always felt like there was a real natural kind of love triangle, very much in the vein of the King Arthur tale: Arthur at the center and Lancelot and Guinevere all connecting romantically. In that story, theyre all good people and theyre all heroes. But the heart wants what it wants, and that can complicate things.

Gina Fattore, Dawsons Creek co-executive producer: The Joey and Pacey chemistry that was there in season one obviously worked.

Sarah D. Bunting, cofounder of Television Without Pity: Joey and Paceys chemistry was, you know, actual chemistry, and not this sad two-wet-envelopes-lying-next-to-each-other thing that was happening with Dawson and Joey.

Tara Ariano, cofounder of Television Without Pity: Pacey was obviously the better character and always had been. And the two of those actors were like magic to watch.

Greg Berlanti, Dawsons Creek showrunner: Because I had written so many episodes, the network and the studio and the cast wanted me to step up and run the show, rather than import a new person.

I was very hesitant at first. I tried to turn it down. But they said theyd help me.

I said I would do it if they let me have an actual gay kiss between two characters. That had never happened on network TV before. And the network agreed to that. So after that, I felt like it was worth it.

Gina Fattore, Dawsons Creek co-executive producer: It says a lot about how much TV has changed that like we were like, Okay, were gonna set up Joey and Pacey for like 12 episodes. And also we need to end a lot of the other storylines and stuff. We didnt really get there and activate that story till the 12th episode of the season.

Greg Berlanti, Dawsons Creek showrunner: When we finally did start to reorient the season around that love triangle narrative, in the back half, we were just doing stuff on the fly. But it was really connecting with the audience.

Sarah D. Bunting, cofounder of Television Without Pity: The Joey-Pacey stuff was more interesting to recap.

Tara Ariano, cofounder of Television Without Pity: They were so much more fun to watch, too. Thats what you want in a teen drama, is that kind of spark, and it doesnt happen that much.

Greg Berlanti, Dawsons Creek showrunner: It was as atypical then as it is now for the ratings to grow for a show in season three or beyond. But the ratings started to grow again.

The actors were happy, and everybody was excited. I think we found what the show would be without Kevin there.

Gina Fattore, Dawsons Creek co-executive producer: By the time you get to the final beat of a story, it should be rolling downhill. If you have set everything up correctly, it should be falling into place like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

Sarah D. Bunting, cofounder of Television Without Pity: It was, in a strange way, fanservice. Because that whole season, leading up to crying Dawson, you could kind of sense that Dawson was going to get a cartoon skillet in the face.

With the Joey-Pacey-Dawson love triangle in place, the show approached its season three endgame: the moment when Dawson would have to tell Joey to go to Pacey. Fans anticipated Dawsons comeuppance eagerly. But they would have to wait for the finale, True Love, to get what they wanted: the moment when Dawson would cry.

Dawsons tears were funny out of context. But in context, they were incredibly satisfying. In the writers room, they were the culmination of an incredibly vexed and chaotic season of television. And on the boards of Television Without Pity, they were the payoff for three seasons of mounting hatred toward Dawson and everything he stood for.

Sarah D. Bunting, cofounder of Television Without Pity: At least for our corner of the internet, it wasnt so much Will they or wont they? It was, When are they going to screw Dawson over so we can enjoy it?

Tara Ariano, cofounder of Television Without Pity: He was not an appealing lead character. This is often a problem with shows where the leads name is in the title: They have to always make that person the hero because theyre not going to get them out of the show.

Jeffrey Stepakoff, Dawsons Creek co-executive producer: John Wells used to say that writing television is like improv jazz. By the time we got to the end of the season, Greg, Tom, Gina, and me I think we had really, really good improv jazz. We were making beautiful music in the room.

Gina Fattore, Dawsons Creek co-executive producer: We wrote that episode, True Love, together as a group, Tom Kapinos and Jeff Stepakoff and Greg Berlanti and I. We traded off on scenes.

Tom Kapinos, Dawsons Creek showrunner: I wrote the Dawson crying scene! Who knew back then?

I actually compared the script file to the finished product, and its pretty much word-for-word. I think Greg may have tweaked a little bit of the dialogue here and there. That just goes to show how that whole season was essentially crisis mode: We were writing this stuff really quickly.

Gina Fattore, Dawsons Creek co-executive producer: I was the one who actually went to Wilmington [where the show was shot] with the script. I was there when they shot it. I was standing in Dawsons backyard.

Greg Berlanti, Dawsons Creek showrunner: Until you said that GIF came from the end of season three, I did not remember that. Im not saying that we had Dawson cry a lot, but

Gina Fattore, Dawsons Creek co-executive producer: I dont think we would have scripted a crying response. As a general rule, our scripts were light on stage directions. They were mostly just dialogue.

Tom Kapinos, Dawsons Creek showrunner: It says, Joey makes a decision, a simple enough gesture, and in that single second, Dawsons reserve shatters. He cant hold it together anymore. Theres a little bit more talk, and he says, Just go. And then I write, And he means it. Tears streaming down his face. And then Joey backs away from the scene.

So yeah, its in there!

Television Without Pity recap, 2000: Just go, Dawson commands her. Jo, go, Im telling you, before I take it all back, all right. Just go! GO! Joey turns, and as soon as shes looking the other way, Dawsons face crumples into the most hideously misguided man-crying scene since Luke Skywalker learned the truth about his father in The Empire Strikes Back: Noooooooo! Thats not true! Thats impossible! Joey runs through the wedding. Dawson collapses in a heap of moist sobbing goo on the dock.

Gina Fattore, Dawsons Creek co-executive producer: Anytime you got to a season finale, theres just that combination of exhaustion and excitement. And it was just such a hard year in so many ways.

Ive often found that the emotions of your real life spill over into what youre making. And I know for myself, I couldnt believe that I had finally made it there. To this moment where I could just be standing in Dawsons backyard, feeling a sense of relief that we had actually done it and made it to the end.

So I was thrilled when James cried! I felt like crying myself. I was like, Okay, this is great.

Tom Kapinos, Dawsons Creek showrunner: I dont know that I meant it, you know, with that intensity. Dawson was certainly an emotional character, but I didnt think of him as someone who would break down crying like that.

Tara Ariano, cofounder of Television Without Pity: Its just so overdone for what the moment is. Its just like, this is a fucking teenager.

Tom Kapinos, Dawsons Creek showrunner: You know, some people are ugly criers, and he was just an ugly crier. So it was just intense. I can see how it took on a life of its own.

Tara Ariano, cofounder of Television Without Pity: Sometimes, especially when its a show that you watch every week and you get to know the characters and the actors so well, when something like this happens, you see it coming. And its like, Oh no. This is beyond the capability of what youre asking this performer to do.

Sarah D. Bunting, cofounder of Television Without Pity: That was absolutely the most unflattering iteration of Dawsons hair and his character, that whole season. And that it culminates in this legitimately brave, I would say hideously ugly cry, where he has what appears to be a painted sea anemone attached to his head, masquerading as hair, and now its on the Mount Rushmore of GIFs? I mean, this poor man, truly.

Tara Ariano, cofounder of Television Without Pity: Like it was so funny. But also you just sort of felt bad for him, too. This is still a very young actor, and thats one of his very first roles. Playing the pathos of this moment is clearly beyond him. It was like, Oh yeah, this is not gonna be good for you. The fans are going to destroy you for this.

Sarah D. Bunting, cofounder of Television Without Pity: GIFs were miserably hard to make back then. You needed a staff. You needed to be a smart-smartie. And they were already happening. The number of screenshots people took! Or people physically using a disposable camera to photograph it. Demian, one of our moderators at the time, was the one who with a hammer and tongs crafted the first GIF and uploaded it to the forums.

People recorded it. It was a thing. But as far as thinking that in 20 years you will say crying Dawson and my almost-80-year-old parents will know what that is? I dont think I wouldve thought that.

Dawsons Creek went off the air in 2004, after six seasons of melodramatic love triangle configurations and reconfigurations. But the GIF of Dawson crying would go on much longer.

To get a grasp on the afterlife of the GIF, I spoke to some of the people who would help it live on. Filmmaker Lauren Palmigiano asked Van Der Beek to recreate the GIF for a Funny or Die meme in 2011 in a sketch that rocketed across the internet. And Nahnatchka Khan, the director of Always Be My Maybe and showrunner for Fresh Off the Boat, would draw on the legacy of the GIF when she had Van Der Beek parody himself in her cult-classic sitcom Dont Trust the B in Apartment 23.

Meanwhile, I asked internet culture reporters Miles Klee and EJ Dickson to weigh in on exactly why the Dawson Crying GIF endured so long and why it was probably one of the first GIFs many people ever saw.

Nahnatchka Khan, showrunner for Dont Trust the B in Apartment 23: I feel like it was one of the first ones to go really viral? Its just the perfect length: At first, you dont think hes going to go as far as he does and then he goes to the final face. Its certainly one of the first GIFs I can remember seeing.

Miles Klee, internet culture writer: This GIF is really peaking in the five to 10 years after the show ended, especially around the 2009 to 2011 era, when Tumblr culture and some of those adjacent subcultures were very preoccupied with very recent nostalgia for things from high school or just a few years ago. That was the kind of peak for that scene. Youd use it to indicate any kind of histrionic emotion.

EJ Dickson, senior culture writer for Rolling Stone and former editor for the Daily Dot: It was probably one of the first GIFs I ever saw. My understanding is that use of this GIF was primarily taking place on Tumblr. I dont know if GIFs were as integrated into our cultural lexicon then as they are today.

Lauren Palmigiano, filmmaker: I was a writer/director at Funny or Die. Often celebrities would be interested in doing something silly with us, and James came in for a meeting. Usually, the deal when someone comes in is the writers have all met beforehand and come up with ideas for this person, and they come into the room and we just start throwing ideas. James liked a bunch of ours, and he got the joke and was down to make fun of himself, so we ended up doing a full Van Der Week.

Nahnatchka Khan, Dont Trust the B in Apartment 23 showrunner: When we were looking to shoot the pilot for Dont Trust the B in 2011, I knew I wanted Chloe [played by Krysten Ritter] to have a friend who was playing themselves. It felt like she would be friends with someone famous. Our casting director put together a small list of zeitgeist actors who were the right age, who were really funny actors, who would be down to play themselves.

James was at the top of the list. He did a bunch of Funny or Die videos where he made fun of himself. He seemed to have a great sense of humor.

So we sat down with him, and he was so game for everything. He completely got the joke.

Lauren Palmigiano, filmmaker: One of the pitches came from me. The crying meme was the most internet-y thing about James Van Der Beek, so I thought, why not make more? We thought, lets celebrate it, make more of them, add to it. And it might be something that makes some noise on the internet. Which was always the goal at Funny or Die: to make something that will get people clicking.

And James had a really great sense of humor about it. He already knew about the meme. He said people had sent it to him before.

James Van Der Beek makes Vandermemes for Funny Or Die in 2011

I had actually been a Dawsons Creek fan growing up. I dont remember clocking his crying when I watched it on the show, but I do remember thinking the scene was heartbreaking. They were breaking up! It was awful. I did love the Pacey years, though.

Nahnatchka Khan, Dont Trust the B in Apartment 23 showrunner: We talked about doing some reference to that GIF, but I dont think it ever made it into the final shooting script. But he would have been down with it. Its iconic! Even when we were shooting the show, back in 2012, it was known.

Miles Klee, internet culture writer: The popularity of that GIF maybe speaks to that feeling that the stuff you liked as a teen is pretty cringe when you think about it. You were maybe obsessed with it at that time, and you go back and youre like, Oh, lol, its these older people playing teens, written by older people who are pretending to know what teens do today.

But because it is using these heightened teenager emotions, which are a real thing, its also timeless. Youre cringing at your past self but also recognizing why these things had such power over you.

EJ Dickson, senior culture writer for Rolling Stone: Its the same as the Saved by the Bell Im So Excited meme. It resonates in the same way. The cast was on this teen show that wasnt taken seriously, they were attempting to do a dramatic scene, and the actors were extremely earnestly trying to communicate this tonal shift. James Van Der Beek clearly took it extremely seriously, and the earnestness just backfired so tremendously. And theres nothing the internet loves more than failed earnestness.

Miles Klee, internet culture writer: I would compare this GIF to that moment on The Simpsons when Lisa dumps Ralph Wiggums publicly in this really humiliating way. And then Bart keeps replaying the moment, and hes like, You guys, look, if you slow it down, you can see the exact moment that his heart tears in half.

And when you see that GIF, you actually do have the visceral, physical feeling of your heart exploding, just torn asunder. Thats what the face is conveying. Its just this total collapse.

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An oral history of the Dawson crying GIF and its outsized legacy - Vox.com