James Van Der Beek’s Best Work Was Funny and Odd: Critic Appreciation

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.

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 Wednesday 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, but it also gave him his best opportunities, the roles that, for many critics, confirmed how much he was actually capable of.

Sure, he was playing James Van Der Beek on Don’t Trust the B—- in Apartment 23, which aired on ABC for two seasons that almost nobody watched, though it has deservedly gained a passionate following in a secondary run on Logo and subsequent streaming. If Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back let him play a James Van Der Beek who was a good-natured take-off on himself, Don’t Trust the B—- in Apartment 23 let him burn that guy to the ground. The show’s James was hilariously insecure, uncomfortably candid and willing to do anything to rekindle his stardom. On the surface, it’s a one-joke part, but Van Der Beek and series creator Nahnatchka Khan put in the effort to make “James Van Der Beek” into a real and complex character, the funniest part of a very funny show.

After proving he could also be the funniest part of a not-especially-funny broadcast sitcom (CBS’ Friends With Better Lives), Van Der Beek got to show even more of his range and his commitment to weirdness in the Vice comedy What Would Diplo Do?

I would be lying if I said I understood why What Would Diplo Do? existed at all, as a slight, semi-biographical sketch of the eponymous DJ/producer that aired on a network that never really did scripted comedy before or after. But not only did Van Der Beek star, playing Diplo as a spacey genius with a wild persecution complex, a weird accent and a weirder mustache, but he was the series’ co-creator and primary writer.

What Would Diplo Do? lasted only five episodes, and while it too has found more of an audience in the eight years following, its viewership at the time was probably smaller than some venues entertained by the real Diplo. Still, as a proof of concept for what James Van Der Beek might do left to his own devices, it was fascinating.

Sadly, this was an opportunity he never got again.

Van Der Beek spent a lot of time reprising his work as James Van Der Beek, appearing in likable form on Dancing With the Stars (a joke on Don’t Trust the B—- in Apartment 23), The Masked Singer and The Real Full Monty, a show designed to raise money for cancer charities.

And he still took unpredictable chances, like his appearance in one of the wilder episodes of HBO’s wild ensemble series, Room 104. And he was a perfect stand-in for the doomed decadence of the ’80s in the first season of Pose, a show that initially felt it needed secondary storylines built around well-known white co-stars as a promotional hook for what was otherwise a triumph of unprecedented minority and trans representation. Like the characters played by Kate Mara and Evan Peters, Van Der Beek’s Matt, a rising figure in the Trump Organization, wasn’t on the show after its first season, but for an actor who spent so much of the past decade accentuating his real-life role as family man, Van Der Beek played the reptilian part expertly.

So feel free to remember James Van Der Beek as the aspiring filmmaker with a home on a famous creek or as the back-up quarterback thrust into the spotlight for the West Canaan Coyotes. But also remember the more esoteric roles, the creative work, the myriad reasons it was lame to be Team Dawson but cool to be Team James Van Der Beek.