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DAWSON'S CROCK | PAGE 2 OF 2 If you've managed to escape Dawsonmania thus far, the series revolves around Dawson Leery (James Van Der Beek), a verbose, precocious, sensitive, 15-year-old aspiring filmmaker whose bedroom is a shrine to Steven Spielberg. He can quote chapter and verse on "Jaws" and has his movie posters arranged according to Spielberg hits, Speilberg art and Spielberg bombs. (The proper placement of the poster for "Amistad" will no doubt set off much soul-searching.) Dawson, who lives in a sleepy Cape Cod burg called Capeside, has a platonic female best friend named Joey Potter (Katie Holmes), who is secretly in love with him and it's upsetting her whole tomboy universe. Dawson, however, is smitten with Jen Lindley (Michelle Williams), an atheistic hussy from New York City who was sent to live in Capeside with her Bible-toting grandmother after her father caught her in bed with a boy. The fourth member of the gang is Pacey Witter (Joshua Jackson), Dawson's horny doofus best friend (imagine Kyle MacLachlan starring in "The Wonder Years"), who surprised everyone in the first few episodes by having an affair with his 36-year-old English teacher, who has since left town. All four of them talk in glib, show-offy flourishes of annoying screenwriterese: "Fasten your seat belts, it's going to be a bumpy life"; "I was sexualized way too young"; "Is monogamy such a Jurassic notion?"; "So what do you think Dawson has, a rifle or a pistol?" It's supposed to be clever and edgy and real; instead, it reminds you how believably inarticulate the characters on "My So-Called Life" were. There's a scene in one episode where Dawson turns off a video of "Rebel Without a Cause," whining, "When movies get too unrealistic it bothers me, it gives me a headache." When Joey points out that "ET" wasn't exactly a documentary, he exclaims, "The emotions were realistic!" And he has a point. "Dawson's Creek" is about supposedly "realistic" kids, but it's completely unbelievable, whereas "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," its lead-in on Tuesdays, is about teens who fight vampires and monsters and stuff, but, emotionally, everything about it rings absolutely true. Take the climactic two-part episode earlier this season where Buffy Summers (Sarah Michelle Gellar), the feisty, intuitive 17-year-old who has been pre-destined to save the world from evil, lost her virginity to a boy she thought she knew well (the centuries-old vampire-with-a-cause, Angel) and then he turned on her, mocking her and breaking her heart. It was the saddest TV moment since Angela overheard Jordan referring to her as "nobody," just some girl, after they'd skipped class all week to make out in the boiler room. Yes, "Buffy" is filled with dark satire and creature feature refugees, but the characters are more recognizably human than anybody on "Dawson." I'll take "Buffy's" metaphor for adolescent-boy horniness -- geeky pal Xander is possessed by a hyena -- over the coy masturbation talk of "Dawson's Creek" (Dawson calls it "walking the dog" and he does it in the morning while watching Katie Couric). Where "MSCL" transcended the clichés of teen drama and "Buffy" subverts them, "Dawson's Creek" recycles them. Parents and other authority figures are absent, distracted or virulently disapproving. Friendships are torn asunder by hormones. It's John Hughes all over again. Two weeks ago, the four friends served Saturday detention in the library, just like in Hughes' "The Breakfast Club." I guess it was supposed to be a tribute. As for the sexual predicaments (much tittered-over by TV critics) Williamson and his writers have cooked up for Dawson and his friends, they're strictly the creation of boys who've seen too many videos. Dawson, who considers himself a good guy in the Gary Cooper mold, is the well-meaning shmoe torn between the wisecracking Girl Friday and Lauren Bacall (how old is Jen anyway -- 35?). The Pacey-sleeps-with-the-teacher subplot was played all soft-focus and wistfully comical, like one of those movies where Jacqueline Bisset ushers some underage dolt into manhood. Oddly, coming on the heels of the Mary Kay Le Tourneau story (she was the teacher who was jailed as a sex offender for having an affair, and a baby, with a 12-year-old kid), the Pacey-beds-the-teacher angle was depicted with nary a wisp of a second thought. (The media is following the show's lead -- "Teacher's Pet" was the headline on Pacey's TV Guide cover.) Jen's bad girl past, however, hangs around her like a whiff of stale Shalimar. The most bogus thing about "Dawson's Creek" is its two-faced moralizing: Boy sex is good, girl sex is bad. The writers court teen viewers with scene after scene of broadly drawn adult prigs calling Jen a slut and lecturing about the evils of teenage sexuality. But then Jen voices the same sentiments. In one episode, she somberly tells the virginal Dawson all about her wild past, how she fell in with a bad crowd back home: "They sent me up here because the clichés about teenagers in the big city are true ... Sex at an early age is generally not a good idea." Talk about having it both ways. Williamson has said that "Dawson's Creek" is autobiographical; he really did grow up in a small coastal town (in North Carolina, not Massachusetts) and he really did idolize Spielberg and he really did have a platonic female best friend. But what comes across here isn't the universality of adolescent experience, but the singularity of Williamson's experience. I mean, doesn't anybody else have trouble with the fact that Dawson's town has no hospital, but the high school has a film department worthy of NYU? Still, the only moments that feel sincere are the moments when Williamson, the film freak, is speaking through his characters, when Dawson is bemoaning the fact that being a stand-up guy "hasn't been a desirable character trait for half a century" or when he and Joey climb into his closet and combat the uncertainties of adolescence with a ritual from their childhood -- acting out scenes from "Jaws." "Dawson's Creek" is Williamson's homage to the classic adolescent notion that only this movie or this album or this TV show can express the way I feel, can make sense of things. That pop cultural saving grace could be "ET." It could be "My So-Called Life." It could even be "Dawson's Creek." Nobody ever said teenagers were rational. SALON | March 16, 1998