It all started with Sunnydale and Capeside. In 1998, a few years into its existence, the WB network introduced "Dawson’s Creek," a teen drama set in a fictional small coastal town in Massachusetts, to its Tuesday night line up. Dawson’s Creek aired in the 9 p.m. slot following a little show called "Buffy, the Vampire Slayer" and significantly altered the television landscape for years to come. Then, on Sunday, Sept. 17, the network that created the teen drama genre shuts it television doors for good to remerge as the CW network.

Ostensibly built on easily dismissible “teen” shows, the WB turned high school melodrama into a remarkably cohesive brand, crafting its own aesthetic and narrative conventions with an overwhelming emphasis on youth. The cultural impact of the network’s early shows continues to resonate. After "Dawson’s" and "Buffy" there came "Felicity" and "Angel," and still later on, "Gilmore Girls," "Smallville" and "Everwood," all relatively successful shows built on the foundation of perpetual youth that became the networks trademark.

Culturally, these shows gave us a new code for reading adolescence, a newly defined narrative that shifted focus away from how adults see teenagers to how teenagers see teenagers. In the WB-verse, characters were young, but not stupid, sometimes powerless but never wrong, confused about their actions but never morally unsure. In 14 years of prime-time programming, the networks hour-long dramas all seemed different, yet at their core, were similar to a remarkable degree, simultaneously nostalgic and sentimental, post-modern in their absence of historical context and totally apolitical. Because of this shared world view, the WB bubble was a hard one to burst.

The WB created their own small town America - a safe, apolitical Utopian space within our TV’s reminiscent of "home and hearth" ideals. Capeside, Sunnydale, Stars Hollow, Smallville and Everwood to name but a few, quickly became insular spaces with their own social order and very little influence from the outside world.

Free from the conformity and sterility of suburbia, the grittiness, crime and confusion of the big city and the dull monotony of the country, these fictional places often embraced liberal urban ideas while remaining charmingly intimate and sophisticated providing a sense of purpose, community and belonging sorely lacking in our "real" lives. Despite the danger in Sunnydale or the abundance of villains in Smallville, moral absolutes often prevailed. There was little ambiguity in the WB universe, often regardless of what show you were in. For teens and young adults, the WB’s core demographic, clearly defined lines of good and bad, right vs. wrong, became a welcome change in an increasingly ambiguous world

And yet, that looks like it’s all going to change.

Last year’s series "Supernatural" might be a harbinger of the things to come on the new CW. A show rife with despair, "Supernatural" swirls in a world of post-modern horror, exemplified by endemic violence, increasing disorder, chaos, paranoia and nihilism that, by last season’s end, had its lead characters outright suicidal. The show deftly navigates the emotional landscape of a fractured family in crisis after the gruesome death of their mother, and brothers who deal with familial obligations pitted against individual choices, fraternal loyalty vs. personal fulfillment and grief when it turns into all-consuming aggression. In short, this is serious, grown up stuff.

Last season, the show bared little resemblance to anything else on the network. Come this fall, "Supernatural" will be joined on the CW by the UPN’s "Veronica Mars," which started off its second season by drowning a busload of high school kids. In the season finale, viewers learned that those lives had been pointlessly sacrificed in a complicated plot of political avarice and capitalistic greed, a downer of an ending, to be sure. So, good times ahead.

In the last episode of "Dawson’s Creek," Joey and Pacey finally did get together. Dawson moved to LA to direct his movie. And yes, Jen died, but she died with a martyr’s grace only seen on television. Within the space of the hour-long television narrative, anything was possible. Finding purpose and place in an increasingly disorderly, ambiguous and chaotic world was a daunting but not insurmountable task. With the new CW green lighting darker, more “adult” fare, the youthful utopianism (and not of the hokey "7th Heaven" variety) in the small towns and hamlets of the WB is giving way to murder mysteries and demon hunters.

There are many who would argue that the WB represents popular culture at its worst, a bland blend of white-bred conformity that merely reinforces the existing ideological underpinnings of a capitalist society. Maybe. But it also shifted the cultural landscape and changed the way we watch television. The WB provided viewers with not just escapist fun, though it was that, but, at its best, with the greatest kind of fantasy, the glimpse that even if we couldn’t be young again, we could at least feel like the weight of the world wasn’t crushing us.