Secrets & Fries: From the Classroom to
the local diner, the kids of Roswell bring new meaning to “Teen
Alienation”
To all appearances, the scene that’s being
rehearsed this afternoon on the Hollywood set of Roswell is a
harmless chat between a father and his teenage daughter. The
father played by onetime alternative rock icon John Doe of the
ban X, talks uneasily to his daughter Liz about an upcoming
camping trip and how he’d like to go along, even though he
doesn’t know any of the other dads. Liz, played by Shiri
Appleby, agrees with him – but she hesitates when he adds that
it’ll be a good chance for him to get acquainted with three of
her high-school friend.
“Well, Dad, they’re not humans,” she
explains gently. “They’re aliens.”
“What?”
And then both actors laugh – because, in
the world of Roswell, Appleby’s ad-libbed line is the kind that
should never, ever be uttered. Yes, it’s true that in the show
her pals Max, Isabel and Michael (played by Jason Behr 26,
Katherine Heigl, 21, and Brendan Fehr, 22) are aliens, who as
embryos survived the rumored crash of a spacecraft in the New
Mexico desert in the late 1940s. But their extraterrestrial
identity is a closely guarded secret; they one reason Liz knows
the truth is that Max was forced to reveal it to her in the
show’s pilot episode, when he saved her life. Now Liz and her
human friends Maria (Majandra Delfino) and Alex (Colin Hanks)
are the only ones who know – though the town sheriff, played by
veteran character actor William Sadler, has his suspicions and
pursues those suspicions zealously.
Roswell is a show about secrets, about the
feelings of alienation that everyone has in High school and
about the feelings of alienation that only true aliens would
have. It’s a delicate balancing act, juggling love stories, teen
drama and science fiction. Call it Dawson’s Creek – meets – The
X-Files – not, perhaps, the most encouraging premise.
At least, it wasn’t an encouraging premise
to some of its cast members. “The market is saturated with
teenagers and teenage film and television stuff, and the
majority of them are bad,” Fehr says. “When I first read about
Roswell, I figured they were just jumping on the bandwagon of
all these teen shows – and then you throw aliens in the mix, and
that’s just a recipe for disaster.” Behr adds, “You really have
to have the right kind of people running a show like this,
because in the wrong hands it could be very silly.”
The hands entrusted with keeping Roswell on
tract belong to executive producers Jason Katims and David
Nutter, both of whom are well aware of the pitfalls they face in
developing a series based on the Roswell High series of young –
adult novels by Melinda Metz. “We have to walk a tightrope with
the story line and characters, which is a very tough thing to
do,” says Nutter, a veteran of such sci-fi shows as The X-Files
and Millennium. Katims a former playwright whose television
background involved such shows as My So-Called Life and
Relativity, adds, “We started out by saying that the goal here
is to make this believable and true, and not give the audience a
chance to dismiss it. Because if you give them a reason to
dismiss it, they will.”
