There was a time when hungover twenty and thirtysomethings spent Sunday mornings soaking up re-runs of The Waltons and Little House on the Prairie from the comfort of their sofas. Now there is a less dated option and, up to a couple of weeks ago, the favourite televisual accompaniment to the morning-after Resolve and orange juice was Dawson's Creek, which has just finished its fourth series on Channel 4. The addicted can still catch up on episodes on Network 2, Thursday nights, and filming is starting on the fifth series, which should be on both channels in autumn.
For the uninitiated, Dawson's Creek is Colombia Tristar TV's phenomenally successful "soap" which follows the lives of a group of teenage characters who live in Capeside - a fictitious, Nantucket-style coastal town. From its first series, made in 1997, it grabbed huge ratings in the US. It has proved equally popular all over the world. (There are about 21,900 websites dedicated to the show.)
This is not a soap opera in the traditional sense. Forget the cardboard scenery and gritty realism of Coronation Street or Eastenders and the gloriously hammy acting of Neighbours. You will look in vain, too, for the kitschy glamour and hiss-boo villains of 1980s American series such as Dallas and Dynasty. Instead, Dawson's Creek belongs to a glossier genre of TV drama pioneered by Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz in thirtysomething, and imitated in series such as My So-called Life, Party of Five and Once and Again. In this genre, very pretty, beautifully lit Americans grapple with life's dilemmas and analyse these dilemmas endlessly.
This is drama for the post-therapy generations - nice, middle-class types who dress in Gap-style clothes, listen to music from the meeker edges of alt-rock, and are au fait with the significance of their every emotion.
The series has the usual bland characters. There's Dawson, played by James Van Der Beek, an aspiring filmmaker with a Steven Spielberg fixation; his best friend Joey (Katie Holmes); his sardonic buddy Pacey (Joshua Jackson); and new kid in town Jennifer (Michelle Williams), whose wild-child tendencies made her parents ship her off from New York to her religious granny in Capeside. They wrestle with the usual issues of lust, love, friendship, family and school grades.
The series was the brainchild of Kevin Williamson, the sharp-shooter responsible for the blockbusting teenage horror/comedy films Scream, Scream 2 and I Know What You Did Last Summer. In Dawson's Creek, he managed to create a show that appealed both to adolescents and those in their 20s and 30s.
Joshua Jackson, who plays Pacey, explains: "I think we make a concerted effort not to insult the intelligence of our audience, and if anything we push them to go farther and to think more deeply about different subjects." Jackson is in London's chic Metropolitan Hotel for a short promotional tour before beginning work on the new series.
"I think that's how we managed to keep the core audience of teenagers who support the show and for anyone else who's watching, well, I think there is a kind of voyeuristic pleasure that goes with being a twentysomething and watching teenagers on a television show, because you are reminiscing - you know, you remember the sting of those events, but it's not quite as personal as it used to be."
Williamson (who moved on after two series) set the tone, making Dawson's Creek a bit more controversial than other teen-angst dramas such as Beverly Hills 90210 (to which it is frequently compared). During the first season, Pacey had an affair with his English teacher and the friends' penchant for "sharing" everything led to discussions about, among other things, masturbation, and frequent mentions of the word "penis", unusual in a prime-time American series. There was also an interracial romance and a gay character. Predictably, representatives of the "moral majority" were not amused.
"Well, I don't now about Europe, but we did get a lot of negative reaction in the States," says Jackson, "and it wasn't over the fact that a 15-year-old was having an affair with his English teacher, which is not only questionable but illegal. No, what really got people up in arms - and this is preposterous - was Dawson and Joey sleeping in the same bed together, even though fully clothed and fully platonic. The fact that they were in the same bed together in the pilot - that really raised the ire of some of those family groups, which seems to me so bizarre.
"Firstly, it means they assume that there can be no such thing as a platonic relationship between a boy and a girl, which I think is an ugly assumption anyway - that no matter how we relate to each other, that it can ultimately only be on the base level of making sexual objects of each other.
"Two, I don't know if any of these people actually listened to what they were talking about in that scene, because they are talking about their first forays into being adolescents and actually speaking about the fact that their relationship is changing now because they are going into high school and she's becoming a woman and he's becoming a man, which I think is the most responsible thing we could have done." He pauses. "It's very strange, the types of things those groups react to."
In terms of his teen audience, however, his on-screen affair was a godsend for Jackson. Up to then, Pacey was a bumbling, self-deprecating type who played second fiddle to the more photogenic Dawson. His liaison with the teacher upped his character's credibility and helped make a heartthrob of the actor. He must have cheered when he read the script?
"Well, being that I was 18 years old at the time it seemed perfectly reasonable to me that I could have an affair with an older woman," he laughs. "In retrospect, I see of course it was going to raise eyebrows, but it didn't really seem out of the ordinary to me. Although I did call home and say, 'You will not believe what they are allowing me to do on American television - I'm having an affair with a woman!' There's no love-lorpup stuff for Pacey, he's going right out there and having a good time."
Canadian Jackson, now 23, is affable, polite and unspoilt by fame. His mother is Irish and his grandmother, Rose, lives in Dublin. He is very concerned to know when this article will be published so he can let her know.
"I have relatives all over Ireland," he says. "Mostly in Dublin, but in Meath, Bray - all over the place. I've visited them many times, though unfortunately not this time."
Acting since he was nine (he made his debut in an advertising campaign for "Beautiful British Colombia"), he had already appeared in several films before he landed the part of Pacey and has continued to make movies on the side. He is in the much-praised indie director Rose Troche's new feature The Safety of Objects, opposite Glenn Close, and recently wrapped the film version of the acclaimed play The Laramie Project, in which he co-stars with Laura Linney, Peter Fonda, Steve Buscemi and Christina Ricci.
Of all the young actors in Dawson's Creek, he seems the most likely to forge a long-term career. He is bright and diplomatic about most things - such as the fact that the teens in the show talk in psychobabble.
"The conceit is that we allow these . . . children, really . . . to be unbelievably introspective and eloquent about the things that are going on with them, but they are still tied into being teenagers. They don't have the benefit of experience, but they do have the benefit of language and awareness, which is something I would have loved to have had as a teenager. I wish I could have said 'this is what's going on with me and this is why I'm acting out here or I'm frustrated with this or angry with that'. But it's your first time experiencing all those things at that age, so you don't have the language or you don't have the tools necessary to be able to communicate.
"Nobody talks like these kids talk! Nobody on earth, at any age. But that's part of the fun of the show, that we give them this device."
He is suitably modest, too, about the fact that Pacey, in turning from clown to prince, to some extent stole Dawson's thunder.
"I'm aware that Pacey became a popular character, but I think a lot of that has to do with him being involved with Joey, because Joey is really and truly the central character of the show. She's the heart and soul of the show and any character that is involved with her necessarily becomes the next most important character. But essentially my job hasn't changed. I basically just go in and do what I do and everything else happens outside of me."
Yet, despite the presence in the room of one of the company's publicity people during the interview (US film and TV companies have started chaperoning interviews with big stars, presumably lest the interviewer asks an "awkward" question or the "talent" starts mouthing off about being underpaid or underloved), Jackson admits that he is not comfortable with the commercialism that surrounds the show.
Aside from the usual merchandising - soundtrack CDs, mugs and so on - Dawson's Creek has an "official clothing provider". Which means that enthusiastic (or gullible) fans can buy the clothes worn by their favourite characters. Initially, the sponsor was J Crew, then it changed to American Eagle. Both make mid-market casual clothes.
"Actually I don't have to deal too much with the official clothing providers because the peculiarity of Pacey's taste is that he has very loud Hawaiian shirts and very loud everything. It's big and it's bright and very loud. So I didn't have to be too much in the J Crew or the American Eagle. But that's more about corporate sponsorship than it is about having the right clothes for the show. And actually I don't really agree with that practice too much. I don't mind real-life objects being part of the show. I mean, if the kids are drinking Coke in a scene, then they should be drinking Coke. But when it gets down to corporate sponsorship, where you can only wear J Crew clothes, then what we are making is an ad between the ads and then I have a problem with that."
Jackson today is in a stylish suit that looks suspiciously like Armani, and blends in perfectly with the minimalist chic of the Metropolitan, home of the Met Bar. "In my regular life I don't dress like this every day, but I thought I'd get dressed up today," he smiles.
His no-nonsense approach will serve him well. I ask if he is afraid of being typecast. "No, I mean you can be typecast, but most people who get typecast deserve it because they never change their performance. So if I can change and grow then I don't think I'll be typecast, and if I don't then I deserve to be typecast and I shouldn't have a film career. I mean, if every performance I give is the same, then I'm not a very good actor."
You feel his days at Dawson's Creek are numbered. "Well, hopefully the show won't go on and on and on," he says carefully. "There would have been really a wonderful symmetry if it had ended after the fourth - when they finished high school. That would have been my first choice, because that is really the end of the story of this group. Because the tie that binds is high school and you don't get to see those people you were at high school with that often. Your life takes you on a different track - some people go to school, some people get jobs, some people travel the world. So the challenge for our show next year is to find some plausible explanation as to why these people would have any contact with each other ."
Can we have more details, please? No, we can't. "I wish I knew! I know that we won't be in our little hamlet of Capeside any more, we'll be going to Boston. I know all of the characters are returning, but that's all. The scripts haven't even started to come in yet."