by Emily Maesar, Associate TV Editor

Of all the years I’m covering in this series, I think that the 1997-1998 TV season was, perhaps, one of the ones with the least overall staying power. It gave us two huge shows with the WB’s Dawson’s Creek and Comedy Central’s South Park (one of which is still popping around with specials), but almost every other teen (or teen adjacent) show basically doesn’t exist anymore.

This is in part due to the weird transition period of home entertainment in the 1990s, but also the weird (and often bad) transition to streaming in the modern era. Which… we’ll get into it! First, however, let’s talk about the two shows I wanted to focus on. One of which is, you guessed it, Dawson’s Creek. 

There’s a lot to love about this WB show: it’s set in my home state of North Carolina, it had one of the first gay characters on broadcast, in a teen show, with Jack (Kerr Smith), and it was about a hopelessly romantic film nerd. All of which are things I love! Dawson’s Creek dealt with a lot of normal teen feelings and events, as well as some that are (one might say) a bit over-represented in the medium (Pacey’s first storyline certainly comes to mind). The show opens with two best friends, Dawson (James Van Der Beek) and Joey (Katie Holmes) talking about how they really shouldn’t have sleepovers anymore because they’ve hit a point where it’s just impossible that it could be platonic. Or, at least, that’s how Joey feels. Dawson doesn’t really see it that way, though, and their quite frank (especially for the time period) conversation about sex, while lying on his bed, is quite an opening. 

Falling in love with your best friend is, after all, a kind of universal experience of teenagerdom, especially in media. When Jen (Michelle Williams) moves to town, Joey sees that it’s not that Dawson isn’t interested in romance… he’s just not interested in it with her. At least at the moment. If you were to view this era as the real start of teens on television, which is what I’m positing, then you could argue that the messy relationships between the four leads (where everybody ends up dating everybody else, at least in a straight way) is the start of shipping wars in teen shows. It’s hard to actually see this from a modern perspective, since the internet was still a baby, but it was certainly present and remained present as blogs and message boards started to take over online discourse.  

Then there’s the student-teacher relationship of it all. At the initial time of the series, it wasn’t an overly common trope in teen media, but it was a kind of source point for teen television’s prevalence of that storyline in the future. And it’s the first thing the show really does with Pacey (Joshua Jackson), who later becomes Joey’s love interest (my personal OTP of the show, of course). If you’re looking for the perfect encapsulation of teen dramas moving forward, then Dawson’s Creek is the specimen. It’s where normal teen dramas (not genre pieces like Buffy the Vampire Slayer) end up splitting up from their true teen soap opera roots of Beverly Hills 90210. Dramatic, but with a vastly different vibe then those found at West Beverly Hills High. 

While I mentioned South Park earlier, a deeply important (however you wanna feel about that) show in the adult animation space whose target audience was largely teen boys and men in their early 20s, the other show I actually wanted to talk about was the Canadian teen comedy Student Bodies. Partially because, surprise, over the course of this column I am gonna talk about Canadian teen shows that made it to the states, but also because it’s one of the few teen shows from this year that managed to live on to any degree. 

Student Bodies was a series that spanned three seasons and 65 episodes on YTV in Canada and first-run syndication on FOX networks in America. The vibe was very Saved By the Bell meets Lizzy McGuire, before that show had aired. It was set at a high school (seemingly in the US, which is interesting) and followed a group of students who were creating an alternative student paper for their school. That’s the Saved By the Bell part, since they’re basically only ever at school and a coffee shop that they frequent (a classic late 80s and early 90s locale). The Lizzie McGuire aspect would be the art and the way the show lived in the head of Cody (Jamie Elman), the lead character and artist for “Student Bodies.” The pilot tells the story of how the paper came to be, while they’re trying to decide which issue to include in the millennium time capsule. Ultimately, it’s a really fun series that is actually available (if you’re in Canada) on CTV to stream. Anywhere else, though? You’re outta luck, other than technically illegal sources like uploads on YouTube. 

Which brings me to my larger point about this particular season of television, but also to perhaps the biggest hill I’m willing to die on. First, it has been said (and I agree) that, in our current era, piracy is a deeply effective form of media preservation. With the way that studios are canning completed projects before they premiere, pulling already existing projects from their platforms (many of which will never exist on home media), or are editing projects well after they have already been seen, it becomes imperative to culture to try and save as much as we can.

Second, is that the advent of home media by way of VHS tapes, DVD box sets, and Blu-ray collections was an ultimate game changer. Not only did it allow people to revisit their favorite stories in both film and, eventually, television, but it also became a form of preservation in and of itself. Additionally, the flood of blank tapes and writable discs also facilitated the piracy element of this equation, as well. 

Of all the teen shows I considered covering in this month’s column, Dawson’s Creek was the only one that’s actively available on DVD and streaming. (South Park is too, but I don’t consider it a teen show in actuality.) However, both the DVD and streaming releases of Dawson’s Creek had a particular issue: a music issue. We’ll get back to that in a moment, though! While this season wasn’t a particularly strong one for new teen shows, it doesn’t seem like home media editions of shows like Teen Angel (from ABC) or Breaker High (from CTV) were ever made, let alone given the streaming treatment in the present. (And Breaker High stars Ryan Gosling, so you’d think somebody would want to get that out there!) At least you can get Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place as a complete series on DVD, one of the other shows I considered since the pickings were horribly slim. 

But okay. What was happening that caused most shows to never get a home release? Certainly, the limited run of many shows was a cause. Teen Angel and Breaker High only lasted a season each, after all, despite Teen Angel having similar viewership to Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place—on the same network, even. Well, in terms of DVDs, the answer is quite easy: cost and timing. Invented in Japan in 1996, the first DVD players made their way to the US in 1997 with the help of Warner Brothers. They cost a crisp $799-ish (or roughly $1,500-ish in today’s money), so most of the DVDs that were coming out at the time were the big budget films. You know, things that one could argue were worth their $25 price tag (almost $50 today). So, if television was being released to home media, then it was doing so on VHS still—which it wasn’t doing very often because of a few reasons, one of which was the piracy that writable VHS tapes facilitated. And while I’m sure there’s something about cost in there too, it’s clear from the numbers that the ability to pirate TV shows from tape to tape didn’t actually stop the normal consumer from buying their own, officially made, copy of their favorite show or film.

Fast forward to our modern era and streaming is the new physical media (though it shouldn’t be! Physical media forever, y’all!) One of the biggest issues with streaming for older shows, though it doesn’t appear to be an issue for films quite as much, is music rights. While this is not my deep area of expertise, I do know that the deals that most shows had (after the advent and common use of DVDs) often meant that the license of music encompassed not just the original broadcast, but also home release. However, they couldn’t see so far into the future as to imagine a world with streaming, and thus a lot of needle drops in classic shows are replaced with something more generic when the shows finally arrive on streaming. It would be prohibitively expensive to re-license all the music, so if you want to see your favorite show in an easily accessible place… then it’s gonna change a bit.

But let’s talk about Dawson’s Creek, specifically, and the growing pains of not one, but two, technological movements. The original theme song for the show was “I Don’t Wanna Wait” by Paula Cole. However, the DVDs for Dawson’s Creek didn’t start coming out until the series was airing its final season in 2003 (which was the era that studios finally caved and said okay to releasing shows on DVD). Since they didn’t have the rights for the classic theme song on the DVDs (and later streaming), the song was replaced with "Run Like Mad" by Jann Arden—well, kinda. For the first three seasons on DVD, they licensed the original theme song. When it became too expensive, though, they moved to the Jann Arden song for all future releases. However, in 2021 Paula Cole re-recorded “I Don’t Wanna Wait” and the show re-licensed the new master of the song for the main credits before its release onto Netflix (a place it doesn’t live anymore, the other pain of streaming). However (again), two versions of the show exist on streaming at the present moment. Hulu has the show with the Jann Arden theme and Amazon Prime has the re-recording of the Paula Cole song. It's a mad mad mad mad world… obviously. 

All of which is to say that the landscape of this television year is largely forgotten teen shows. At the end of the day Dawson’s Creek is kind of the only show you need from this TV season, but it’s also deeply weird that almost none of it exists in a perceivable way. Perhaps it’s just because so many other teen shows were still on air or because this was an era before the home video market for television exploded on account of DVDs—the mid-2000s were when DVD box sets were king, after all, well past the prime and interest of shows like Teen Angel. However, the forgotten teen shows of the late 1990s are important to the fabric of what came after, because they were templates for how to treat shows that didn’t do as hot as the studios wanted. Trash ‘em and move on, which seems to be the current motto for studios like Warner Bros, who fought so hard for DVDs in the US. It’s a nightmare and this is just where we kind of live now, unfortunately.