Busy Philipps Calls Out Pacey’s Inappropriate Dawson’s Creek Romance

Busy Philipps just revisited one of Dawson's Creek's messiest early plotlines, and yeah, it still raises eyebrows. She also got to flip the script on it in a way I did not see coming.

The storyline that aged like milk

In Season 1, Pacey Witter (Joshua Jackson) gets involved with his 36-year-old English teacher, Tamara (Leann Hunley). It was framed as a taboo romance at the time; it is very clearly predatory now. The show even has Pacey lose his virginity to her. Not great!

Philipps' take now (and the reunion twist)

Philipps didn’t show up on the series until Season 5, when she played Audrey Liddell, who dates Pacey. At a recent Dawson's Creek Class Reunion charity event, the cast did a live read of the pilot. Because the universe has a sense of humor, Philipps took on Tamara during the read — the same teacher who was Pacey’s on-again-off-again 'forbidden' flame early on.

She pointed out the obvious timeline weirdness — Audrey and Pacey aren’t even a couple in those early episodes — and then called out the student-teacher relationship for what it is: wildly inappropriate. She also made a wry aside about series creator Kevin Williamson. He wasn’t on the show by the college years, so he never actually wrote Audrey — but when she played Tamara at the reunion, she joked that, in a roundabout way, he finally did write her a Dawson's Creek role; it just took two decades for her to be the right age for it. (Philipps, 46, is also known for White Chicks, among a bunch of other things.)

Joshua Jackson has weighed in too

Jackson has talked about that storyline recently as well. He’s clear about where the responsibility lies and why it matters to portray these situations honestly on screen — not as some dreamy fantasy, but as a boundary-crossing mistake.

'I think it is real for a younger person to have sexual desires for an older person. But I think the onus remains upon the older person to be the adult and recognize that that's inappropriate.'

He also added that the show didn’t treat Pacey and Tamara as a beautiful or romantic thing, and that showing human screwups has value — especially when the culture has (thankfully) moved forward on this stuff.