Stars:Michelle Williams, Joshua Jackson, Katie Holmes, James Van Der Beek
Think:Party of Five meets My So-Called Life. Four bright, hormonal high-schoolers come of age in fictional Capeside, an idyllic Massachusetts harbor town.
They Say:"My most personal work to date," says co-creatoe/executive producer Kevin Williamson, of his tv debut.
We Say:With Williamson's dead on ear for Gen-Ex speak, and knack for creating solid characters, this is primetimes closest thing to Catcher In The Rye. The WB will pair it with cult faveBuffy The Vampire Slayer, for a sizzling Tuesday lineup.
"I'm having a nervous breakdown", says Kevin Williamson, with a tinge of hysteria in his voice. Hey, it's understandable if he's a little tightly wound. The 32-year-old screenwriter is Hollywood's newest flaver-of-the month; he has three hit movies, a $20 million screenwriting deal, a five new projects, including Dawson's Creek.
"My assistant was proofing a script the other day, and she went, 'Kevin, who's Luke?' and I realized I was writing the wrong character in the wrong plot," says Williamson, who has been credited with single handedly reviving the horror flick for the 90's after penning the hits Scream, and Scream 2.
It's all part of the dizzying career path of the native Southerner who grew up the son of a fisherman in New Bern, a sleepy North Carolina town. Like Dawson, his series' protagonist, Williamson was so obsessed with Hollywood, and his idols, Steven Spielberg in particular, that he cajoled his school libarian into ordering a subscription to Variety. Intent on a film career, Williamson graduated fron East Carolina University with a degree on drama and moved to New York to pursue acting. Soon frustrated, he moved to Los Angeles, and enrolled in a screen writing class.
"When I began finishing the the teacher's sentences for him, I knew this was it," says Williamson, who recently moved from a rent cotrolled apartment into "the little house that 'Scream' bought, on the fringes of Beverly Hills. Now he has become the screenwriter of choice to a new generation of actors such as Sarah Michelle Gellar(Buffy The Vampire Slayer)who starred in Williamson's fall hit, I Know What You Did Last Summer.
What's his secret for so accurately capturing the teen experiance? "I take the kids who are basically immature," says Williamson,"and turn them into the responsible ones."
