Kevin Williamson TV Shows Ranked: ‘Dawson’s Creek,’ ‘Vampire Diaries’ & More

Williamson is a master of campy and parodizing horror, but Stalker was a straight-faced miss. The procedural had a voyeuristic fixation on violence, usually directed at women, and as a result, it was nigh on impossible to watch. Stars Dylan McDermott and Maggie Q deserved better.

The same self-absorption and over-analytical chattiness that made Dawson’s Creek charming made Wasteland taxing, because the latter TV show’s characters are a little older and should be a little wiser. But with their un-self-aware whining, they don’t so much air their anxieties as take the oxygen out of the room.

Again, this show didn’t exactly mark the Glory Days of Williamson’s career. But in his defense, network execs pushed a derivative, CSI-style whodunit conceit on his original, semi-autobiographical premise of a young writer returning to his hometown to face the locals he burned with a thinly veiled novel. (We say, release The Williamson Cut!)

In the mid-2000s, when The CW was all in on teen dramas, Williamson gave us this middling series, another whodunit. Michael Cassidy, Taylor Handley, and Amber Heard star as young adults caught up in a Palm Springs murder mystery, which, unfortunately for the small fanbase, wasn’t resolved by the time the show was canceled.

A sci-fi novel by Karl Alexander turned into a sci-fi TV drama by Williamson, with Josh Bowman playing Jack the Ripper and Freddie Stroma playing an H.G. Wells who actually created a time machine and pursues Jack into our present. We’ve seen that schtick before — in 2014’s Forever and 2008’s New Amsterdam — but this was still a funTime.

Kevin Bacon will always be a marketable actor, but James Purefoy was the real star of this crime serial, playing a serial killer who cultivates a cult as Bacon’s FBI agent tries to stop his villainy. In the story, the cult’s followers are everywhere, leading to many a twist… of the knife. (The show is seriously gory, so proceed with caution.)

Williamson adapted the Spanish anthology Cuéntame un cuento into this thriller series, which transforms classic fairy tales into twisted crime sagas that even the Brothers Grimm would watch between their fingers. And in a treat for Williamson’s fans, both seasons feature Paul Wesley and Danielle Campbell of the Vampire Diaries Universe.

With Julie Plec, Williamson developed a young-adult book series by L. J. Smith for the screen, and its protagonist’s romantic en-fang-lements with two vampire brothers were enough to make fans forget about a certain other vampire love triangle. Across eight seasons, this show staked the hearts of supernatural YA fans.

Show us a millennial TV viewer who didn’t say “I Don’t Want to Wait” for each new episode of this seminal teen drama. With meme-worthy scenes, a long-running love quadrangle, groundbreaking TV moments, and four bankable lead stars, Dawson’s Creek is an exemplar of coming-of-age stories and a touchstone for those of us who were teens at the turn of the millennium.