Continuing our spoiler-filled look back at cult TV shows past, we turn our attention to the 99-02 teen sci-fi/romance/hairstyle drama Roswell (AKA Roswell High in its first season). Gel up your hair, turn on some Dido and prepare to look soulful in the rain. We're off to catch up with the prettiest aliens ever (sorry ALF...)
“I’m Liz Parker, and five days ago I died. Then things started to get really weird…”
In October 1999, The WB debuted Roswell, a show that was at heart quite a sweet romance story, with the rather graphic (for the time, station and audience) shooting of female lead Liz Parker. Fortunately the dark and brooding (of course) Max Evans was on the scene, and in order to save the girl he had been crushing on, he was forced to expose her to his secret: he (along with his adopted sister Isabel, and his best friend Michael) is an alien who arrived on Earth in the famous crash of the 40s, and survived in stasis just long enough to awaken in the 80s and reach maturity at
just the right time to cash in on the “super powered teen balances high school, romance and secret double-life” trend that Buffy had kickstarted a few years before. Oh, and he can heal people with his freaky space powers. But she totally mustn’t tell anyone.
Liz totally goes on to tell her best friend Maria (and a few episodes later other best friend/token comic relief Alex).
Thanks a lot, Parker
And thus a gang of unlikely friends is formed, and tasked with dealing with the weird goings on in their town while keeping a secret that could put them at risk. Oh, and they all have epic sexual chemistry that leads to lots of awkward flirting and angst.
Throw in Liz’ jock boyfriend who doesn’t trust our alien pals, and who happens to be the son of the equally suspicious town sheriff, and more moody emotional night-time rain than you would ever realistically see in a desert town, and you have the makings of a totally tedious, uninspired and predictable teen drama. You know from the start that at some point Liz will leave her boyfriend Kyle for Max. You know Kyle will come to respect and trust Max. You know that token hothead Michael will turn out to be more sensitive and decent than he first seems. And so on, and so on.
Except… Somehow, it works. It really does. There’s something incredibly likable about the cast - which includes a young Colin Hanks and Katherine Heigl.
No Roswell, no 27 Dresses. You're welcome, World!!
The
token ‘villain’ Sheriff Valenti (William Sadler, most famous for
sucking at Twister in Bill And Ted, and sucking at getting dressed
before karate-ing in Die Hard 2) actually proves to be one of the more
sympathetic and complex characters - he really is suspicious about the
extraterrestrial trio, he has a fairly good inkling what their secret
may be, but while he wants to find the truth about what happened on the
day that Liz Parker was shot, he also
genuinely wants the gang to be safe. They are, after all, children his own son’s age. And as more shady government MIB types descend on Roswell - lead by Darla off of Buffy and the young and attractive (obv) Agent Pierce - there is a genuine sense of mounting paranoia, and every episode carries an undercurrent of tension.
The plot is advanced by the reveal of Tess, another teenage alien played by Her Off Of Lost, and her shape shifting and possibly murderous guardian Nasedo, but really, over-arching plot doesn’t seem to be too important in the first three-quarters of the season. Instead, the various romances, relationships, friendships and rivalries are given time to gently develop and evolve at a natural rate. The story of the aliens may be tried and true (it takes just seven episodes for a native American tribe to have ancient info on the aliens, X-Files style), but the real joy is in seeing the characters interact.
With only a few months of the decade to spare, the show finally stumbled upon the most 90s thing you'll ever see
The real surprise of the show, though, was just how intelligently this first season was presented in terms of direction and cinematography. A surprisingly effective scene in the pilot episode sees the town recreating the ‘47 crash for an annual tourist-trap alien festival - we watch our aliens viewing the burning effigy of a flying saucer in slow motion while Sarah McLachlan plays (
90s, remember?), and despite having known these characters for less than forty-five minutes, we are genuinely moved by their plight, completely feeling their outsider status. There are loads of clever touches like that - one notable example is a dialogue between Max and Valenti in the town’s UFO Centre. Both men are sizing each other up, trying to work out each other’s motives, trying to decide what, if anything, they can confide in each other, and as the conversation continues the camera pans, and the mural in the background reading “Trust No One” is shifted out of view until - as the guys reach an accord - the only word left is “trust”. It sounds cheesy on paper, but such attention to background events, framing and so on really proves that, in it’s debut year at least, the comparison to Buffy was worthy in more than just basic premise and cast.
The first season comes to a close with Pierce closing in on the five aliens. Everything comes to a head at the UFO museum, with Valenti finally choosing sides (he falls on ours, obviously), and in the final skirmish Kyle is shot, and Michael kills Pierce. Max heals Kyle, firmly cementing the trust that Valenti and he had built over the season, and in return Valenti promises to do all he can to protect the aliens. Nasedo morphs into Pierce and infiltrates the MIB to keep them away from Roswell. And with their friends safe, the four space teens head off into the desert to learn the truth about who they really are, and in doing so,
immediately undo all the work (that people literally just killed for) done in order to protect them by unleashing a signal that alerts other (
eeeeeevil) aliens on Earth to their presence.
One of them is a Backstreet Boy
And that is where Roswell very nearly ended. The show had terrible ratings, and this was an era where a decent genre show was lucky to go beyond its first or second season anyway, even if they
weren‘t on Fox. By all rights, Roswell should have been dead. It would have been a strong finale, too - the story we had been following was essentially told, save for that final scene which was not so much a cliffhanger as it was an “And the adventure continues…” But Roswell fans (what few there were) proved to be a passionate bunch, and flooded the WB mailroom with bottles of Tabasco sauce until a second season was announced.
The 90s had been over for a few months, so there's no excuse
They shouldn’t have.
When Roswell returned for a second run, network interference (probably coupled with a writing team who had no doubt never expected to have to come up with more storylines) lead to more sci-fi alien fighting and less character drama. Nasedo was killed off in the first episode (which, oddly, didn’t bring the MIB back to Roswell, because
fuck plot elements that were introduced
one episode earlier), and a bunch of ridiculous baddie aliens called the Skins, who peeled off their skin at random times because Space Monsters, descended on Roswell to try and kill our four aliens to take over… the aliens’ home planet billions of miles away.
This charmless pre-teen cunt is their feared leader
Meanwhile, Max knocks Tess up, another race of aliens that look like glowing blue crystals show up then leave, the new owner of the UFO Centre is regularly possessed by aliens in order to hold alien conference calls, a bunch of sexily dangerous clones of our heroes…
You know they're sexy and dangerous because Hair And Tattoos
…turn up in New York, then either die or leave, Liz nearly gets a new boyfriend after Future Max travels back in time to stop their relationship from ever happening (because dumping her by text seemed cruel), but then her new fella vanishes between episodes, Alex dies in a car crash, Tess turns out to have always been evil, apparently, and buggers off to their home planet with the newborn baby, and Nelly Furtado shows up and sings a pretty song.
That’s selling the season a bit short, to be fair. There was a Christmas episode that was absolutely brilliant, where Max opts not to use his powers to save a hit-and-run victim and risk putting everyone at risk of exposure again, only to be haunted by his decision and make an incredibly poignant trip to a children’s hospital to cure as many terminally-sick children as he can. And the final few episodes, silly plot twists aside, were actually pretty gripping, with some fine performances and some very strong cliffhangers. In the closing stretch of this dire season, the show finally started to feel like the one that people had fallen for the previous year.
Despite this last-minute improvement, Roswell was cancelled after the second season. Apparently the WB thought that a show about a sexy dark-haired superpowered alien living as a high-schooler in small-town America and pursuing a will-they-won’t-they with a local waitress just wasn’t the sort of thing that their audiences wanted. So they ditched it and commissioned Smallville instead.
Totally different
Until, somehow, Roswell was back again. As part of the deal that saw Buffy move to UPN, Roswell found itself gifted a third season on a new station. And with genuine cultural phenomenon (and thematic and spiritual cousin) Buffy now serving as a lead-in to further gift the show with a ready-present [and sizable] audience, there was no way that the show could fail. The mistakes of the previous season would be learned from, the quality would return to the level of its freshman year, and the show would finally live free from the threat of cancella-
...Oh
Ah, the third season. Bless it. We start with Max and Liz getting arrested for trying to steal a spaceship from a Kwik-E-Mart, or something, and things go downhill from there. Isabel - sporting a severe new haircut because Heigl apparently wasn’t expecting to be called back for more - has a new fiance out of nowhere, in the form of the witless, charisma less and ultimately pointless Jesse, whose character is so one-dimensional and irrelevant that - accidentally, I’m sure - his inclusion smacks of nothing but tokenism. Meanwhile, Michael gets a job as a security guard where he leads his team in a battle against Locke to steal some cans of pop, Liz goes to boarding school, then comes back, Max gets his body stolen by an old man, dies, then ghost-possesses the old man and carries on like nothing ever happened, Maria goes to New York to be a musician, then comes back, Max auditions for Star Trek Enterprise in the most forced and cynical attempt at a crossover ever, Isabel gets possessed by… herself, I think, and Liz and Kyle start to turn into aliens themselves.
Meanwhile, there’s an episode called I Married An Alien that spoofs Bewitched (that screenshot up there wasn’t a joke or a photoshoot still), and the main villains of the season for the first two-thirds are the kid’s parents, because they seemingly decide that loving their kids isn’t as important as wanting to find out if they’re space monsters who deserve to be killed.
By this point it's hard to argue their case
The final few episodes do pull things back spectacularly, as Tess returns with the baby, hoping to make amends, and the MIB finally return to work out where the fuck their boss has gone.
"Two years? Really, Guys...?"
Max, poignantly, has to give up his son after Tess is killed, and as graduation comes, the gang is forced to flee Roswell forever with Valenti’s help (Jesse isn’t invited because nobody likes him).
There was no saving the show this time. The ratings were crap for the third year in a row, the episodes were largely poor until the final few for the second year in a row, and nobody really wanted to Tabasco UPN for a fourth season. As we montage over scenes of the gang on the road, including Max and Liz’ wedding, we leave the show for good in the way we first joined it - with a diary narration from Liz.
“I’m Liz Parker… and I’m happy.”
And, I suppose, at this point we as an audience are, too. It was a pretty solid finale. But we probably would have been a hell of a lot happier had the show been cancelled after its first season.
So take comfort from that, Firefly fans...
