James Van Der Beek’s Greatest Trick

Adolescence, as life phases go, is not especially easy to idealize. Dawson’s Creek, though, found a way. The ’90s-era soap opera, disguised as a gauzy coming-of-age drama, gave us the fictional Capeside, Massachusetts, a telegenically rustic hamlet populated by telegenically precocious teenagers—chief among them Dawson Leery, a dreamy filmmaker in the making, who spent six TV seasons angsting and aching his way into the hearts of the show’s young audience.

Dawson was strong and sensitive in equal measure. He was a thoroughly nice guy in a show that refused to treat that status as an insult. He was as thoroughly fantastical as the series that shared his name. But the character worked—and the show worked with him—because, against all odds, he seemed so warm and real. That is mostly because he was played by James Van Der Beek.

Van Der Beek died yesterday at the age of 48, after announcing in 2024 that he had been diagnosed with Stage 3 colorectal cancer. The actor leaves behind a large family—he and his wife, Kimberly, had six children—and a legacy that extends far beyond the character who made him, for a certain generation of TV viewers, an icon.

Dawson’s ended its run in 2003; Van Der Beek, having achieved something at the start of his career that most actors spend their lives pursuing, might have gone on to seek lucrative reprisals of his famous role. Instead, for the most part, the actor left Capeside, choosing work that demonstrated his remarkable versatility. He did comedy and drama and romance. He did film and TV. He played Jonathan “Mox” Moxon, the restless quarterback of Varsity Blues. And Elijah Mundo, the FBI agent of CSI: Cyber. And Matt Bromley, the oversexed and undershamed executive of Pose.

His best role, though, found Van Der Beek playing himself.

Don’t Trust the B---- in Apartment 23, an ABC sitcom whose awkward title belied its easy charm, ran from 2012 to 2014. A gender-flipped and gimlet-eyed update of The Odd Couple, the show starred Krysten Ritter as Chloe, a New Yorker with a habit of ruining her roommates’ lives, and Dreama Walker as June, the wide-eyed, Midwestern-bred woman who gets caught in Chloe’s chaos. But the series also starred, delightfully, James Van Der Beek, who made regular, scene-stealing appearances as Chloe’s best friend—the actor James Van Der Beek.

TV James is an actor and celebrity who is self-conscious and vain in equal measure: a Hollywood stereotype let loose on the streets of New York. TV James carries glossy headshots around with him to distribute, magnanimously, to wayward fans. TV James is engaged in a long-running and passionately petty feud with the actor Dean Cain (played, yes, by the actor Dean Cain). TV James, eager to de-Dawson his personal brand, lends his name to a line of absurdly skinny jeans (tagline: “Put your cheeks in a Beek!”). TV James can think of no higher aspiration than a seasonal appearance on Dancing With the Stars.

The actor who plays himself is an age-old trope. Since well before Larry David came along, celebrities have been breaking their own life’s fourth wall and finding comedy among the wreckage. Van Der Beek, during his Dawson’s run, made a self-referential appearance in the film Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back—his own early attempt, perhaps, to de-Dawson himself.

In Apartment 23, though, he found new verve in the old joke. Having ascended into the sitcom’s semi-fictional form, he created a character who was prickly and smarmy and needy and whiny, and thus richly emblematic of Hollywood then and now. He mocked his industry. He mocked his fame. He mocked himself. (TV James’s overzealous preparations for Dancing With the Stars are, in retrospect, all the funnier, and all the deeper, because Van Der Beek the person eventually appeared on the show.) He remade himself as a human punch line, gamely and, in the end, effectively—playing someone who, through all his flaws, turned a clever but otherwise standard-issue sitcom into a satire.

TV James, like Dawson, is more resonant than he has any right to be. On paper—as scripted—he is aggressively unrelatable. (“I have too much money,” he grouses at one point; “my wallet’s so thick that it’s hurting my back!”) On-screen, though, his plight reverberates. TV James, like Dawson, is trapped in arrested development, perpetually caught between adolescence and adulthood. Underneath his foolishness, he is consigned to an all-too-relatable fate: He is unsure how to reconcile the person he was with the person he wants to become.

All the farce, in that way, hints at tragedy. And it does so because Van Der Beek, playing and mocking himself, also humanized himself. He re-created the magic that made Dawson’s Creek a cultural touchpoint. The show, in exaggerating adolescence—in remaking that consequential phase as a fantasy and a melodrama—also managed to honor it. It took teenagers seriously. Van Der Beek, twisting his remarkable life into a piece of comedy, pulled the same kind of trick. Poking fun at himself, he found something not only real—but also true.