Roswell Take Two

Roswell’s Katherine Heigl talks to Eric Moro about acting, fandom and a new lease of life for the once ailing series.

As the science fiction soap opera fusion that is Roswell comfortably surpasses the halfway mark of its second season, actress Katherine Heigl finds herself finally settling into the co-starring role of the alien / human hybrid Isabel.

Expanding her character’s mythology, playing her own "evil" twin and taking a stab at the horror film genre are just a few of the ways the actress has worked toward perfecting both her craft and character – a far cry from when she first started out in Hollywood back in 1992.

Roswell tells the story of four half alien / half human teenagers who are trying to live normal lives in the New Mexico town of the same name. Their existence becomes threatened when the leader of the group uses his special alien power to heal an injured female student from his school. With their secret sacrificed and their identity exposed, the group must trust their new human friends in order to stay one step ahead of the forces from this world and beyond that would do anything to destroy them.

Experiencing a rather rocky start – Roswell was saved from cancellation by an organized fan campaign – season two finds the fledgling show shifting gears and embracing a more popular format. While nothing can ever be considered certain in the unsteady world of television, Katherine Heigl definitely has the sense that the series is moving in the right direction.

"It’s going well," the actress says. "It’s a lot of work – I don’t remember anymore what it’s like to have a normal life with normal hours! I think the show is finding its groove. It hasn’t been picked up for a third season yet. We’re going through the same thing we went through last year, but I’m fairly confident that it will get picked up. I hope the network is too. [The ratings] have been great. We’re never going to have the ratings of the bigger networks, but at this point we’re on par with Buffy, and that’s one of [The WB’s] highest rated shows."

Part of Roswell’s first season growing pains was the fact that it had no real sense of direction. It tried to be everything to two conflicting audiences – "Dawson’s Creek meets The X Files." Since then, the series’ creators have decided to beef up the show’s sci-fi angle, playing off the popularity of the 1947 "incident" with positive results.

"Last season was difficult because I don’t think anybody knew about the direction of the show and what we wanted to focus on," Heigl observes. "Was it going to be the relationships? Was it going to be the sci-fi? I think a lot of the storylines were sort of thrown in each week as a different issue and a different problem and then were dropped after a particular story was over. That was hard because you didn’t’ feel like there was a continuation to the story.