Bad Guys Gone Good: Our Favorite TV Villains Who Turned Over a New Leaf

Photo: The WB

Jen Lindlely – Dawson’s Creek

Back in the much tamer ’90s, it didn’t take much to be a villain on a teen soap. All it took was to enter in slow motion, come from the big city, and turn the boys’ heads. Transplanted bad girl Jen Lindley fit the bill perfectly.

She arrived in Capeside to escape her dodgy past in New York, but she was immediately labeled trouble by everyone. She didn’t do much to dispel the rumors. In fact, she played the vixen pretty well. She swooped right in and stole the boy next door, Dawson, right out from under Joey.

Eventually, Jen dropped the vampy act and was accepted into the group. Once the girls stopped being threatened by her and the boys stopped chasing her, she fit right in. She became one of the core members of the group, and was the most interesting of the whole bunch.

She never really overcame her troubled adolescence and grappled with all her issues for most of the show, but of course, this didn’t make her a villain. It made her a human, and she was the most tolerable character on the show. If you want to paint anyone as a villain, it should be Dawson for forcing us to listen to his endless existential rants about the philosophies of being a teenager.