5. Scripts of YA

This section presents scripts for all eight aired episodes of Young Americans (YA), for the unaired pilot episode of YA,  and for the three spring 2000 episodes (season 3, episodes 19-21) of Dawson's Creek (DC) in which YA's narrating character, Will Krudski, appeared to promote YA to viewers of DC, for which YA originally aired as a summer 2000 fill-in on The WB network.

The Young Americans (YA) scripts posted on this website are the only YA scripts in the original English known ever to have been made public.  They are identical to the scripts formerly found on the "Strawberry Lane" fansite, on the TwizTV scripts site, and on the "Young Americans" section of the Oxblood television criticism site and still available on the "Young Americans" section of the French-language Hypnoweb television fansite.

The scripts of the eight aired episodes of Young Americans are not transcripts.  They are fan-edited versions of hardcopy production scripts bought in the autumn of 2000 by a YA fan, "Juli" a.k.a. "Jewelianna," who until October 2011 maintained the "Strawberry Lane" fansite.  Juli typed them up into electronic form to post online; back in 2000, scanners were not common.  As she did so, she deleted much but not all material not in YA as aired, transferring that deleted material to a "cut scenes" file that I have copied into this section on the "Material cut" subpage. 

The scripts that result from Juli's editing, the only YA scripts known ever to have been made public, sometimes deviate substantially from the drama as aired, although far less than the production scripts deviated from the drama as aired.  They are neither production scripts nor transcripts, but something midway between the two.

The hardcopy "source" production script of Episode 1 was dated 18 May 2000, according to Juli; the dates of the hardcopy source scripts for the subsequent seven episodes are not known.

In citing Young Americans, care should be taken not to cite the script without first confirming that the drama as aired did not depart from the script in the particular cited.  Conversely, inability to confirm from the script a citation of YA does not necessarily imply that the citation is inaccurate.

However, the script of the unaired pilot episode is a transcript, made by Juli; the unaired pilot does not deviate from it.

Accurate transcripts of the eight aired episodes of Young Americans are wanted.  Ideally, they might be critically annotated with reference to their dramatic and literary allusions, the often-surreal non-verbal imagery and symbolism, and the music in the soundtrack.  Meanwhile, Juli's scripts, accessible on the pages in this section, are vastly better than having no scripts at all.

Ichabod Grubb

First posted January 2011

Last updated February 2024