dawson's creek: bad, bad writing

Every morning we tape Dawson's Creek, and every night we watch it, or Loopy watches it and I putz around and come in sometime. I confess, I have a love-hate relationship with that show. It's some emotionally stunted man's imagination about his teenage years. It's annoying, the female characters are all projections of his emotionally stunted imagination, and the writing is so, so bad.

But somehow when you get into a story, you just want to know what will happen next—even if you know that that, too, will be so, so bad.

The other day the writing was especially bad, so I took notes. The plot: Dawson's father has just died. The key thing to understand about all these little dialogue outtakes is that they are not supposed to be funny.

---
Undertaker: How's your mother doing?
Dawson: She cries a lot.
Undertaker: I understand.
---
Friend: How's Dawson doing?
Friend: He's not so good. His father's dead.
Friend: He blames himself, you know.
---
Friend: Hey man, how ya doin' today?
Dawson: He's still dead. It still sucks.
---
Relative: Tell me, are you dealing with your grief?
Dawson: Yeah, I guess so...
Relative: How are you dealing with it?
Dawson: Huh?
Relative: Where are you channeling all the feelings about your father's passing?
[Seconds later Dawson destroys the answering machine when his father's voice starts coming out of it. Guess that answers that question]
---
(Wise widowed grandmother to Dawson's mother, on surviving the loss of her husband)
Grandmother: ...and inevitably there comes a day that isn't as bad as the day before it...
Mother: (sniff sniff) And what do you do until then? (sniff sniff)
Grandmother: That's what prescription medication is for!
---
Friend (to Dawson): So this is what I'm going to do: I'm going to hug you. And I'm not going to let go for a really long time. And I'm going to tell you that I love you. Which is actually a pretty good deal.
---


I have some dialogue:
"Hey Loopy, how's Dawson's Creek today?"
"It's still on. It still sucks."

Oh no. While looking for a suitable illustration for this post I discovered a terrible, terrible thing on the Dawson's Creek Official Website: they have little snippets of dialogue ("your favorite lines") from EVERY SHOW!!! I could spend hours combing these pages for the absolute worst of the worst to paste on my blog. I will never go back there again, but here's what I found so far:

Jen to Shelly, who is hitting on Jen's boyfriend: "So should you choose to continue draping yourself on him like the slutty wench you are, you and me -- we’re gonna throw down."

Yeah. You an me's gonna go at it. Should you so desire.