he WB's teen alien series Roswell is closing in on the end of its
first season, with startling revelations in store for Max, Liz, Michael,
Maria, Isabel and Alex. But the bigger drama is playing out off-screen,
where the series awaits word from the network on whether it will have a
second year.
The show's ratings have been lackluster, though it maintains a strong cult
following, particularly on the Internet. In an effort to boost those
ratings, the network plans to move the show from its current Wednesday 9 p.m. time slot to Monday nights at 9 p.m. starting April 10. That will
take it out of the line of fire of NBC's hit The West Wing and UPN's
Star Trek: Voyager, and place it comfortably in the wake of The WB's
hit 7th Heaven.
Meanwhile, fans of the show have mounted a campaign to save it, sending
miniature bottles of Tabasco sauce to WB executives and planning to take
out a full-page ad in the April 6 issue of Variety. Tabasco sauce
plays a key role in the show: it's the condiment of choice for the teen
aliens.
Jason Katims, one of the series' executive producers and its "show runner,"
is grateful for the fan support. He took a few minutes to speak with
Science Fiction Weekly about the show and its prospects and to offer
some spoilers (you've been warned) for the end of the season.
Have you received any indications from The WB about the future of the
series? Has it been picked up for next year? When do expect to hear?
Katims: We haven't got any official pickup yet. My understanding is,
we'll probably not know officially until May, when [The WB] announces their
season. ... We're hopeful, but you never know for sure. The WB has been
real supportive of the show, beginning first of all with buying the show
when it was originally developed for Fox, then giving it a really strong
launch and really being behind it. ... And they haven't changed that. You
don't know for sure until you get the pickup, and a lot of factors are
involved that have nothing to do with me. ... So we're just going to work
really hard and make these final episodes of the season great and make it
impossible for them not to pick it up.
Can you give us any spoilers about the season-ending cliffhanger or arc
we can look forward to?
Katims: I think that [it started] with an episode that aired recently,
"Blind Date," where you see this shadowy figure walking through the fire at
the end. ... And in another episode, "Independence Day," where you see someone
protect Michael by shape-shifting into Hank. ... What we'll do by end of the
season is [have the characters] discover the fourth alien they've been
searching for all this time. The cliffhanger at the end of the season is
how certain people of the group become divided because of the presence of
the fourth alien, and it splits them up. ... Once this begins to happen, the
stakes become extremely high, and there's a lot of danger and a definitely
potential for people to die.
What changes can we expect in the show? New writers? New actors? Can you
give us an idea of surprises we might see?
Katims: There is one new character introduced this season: Tess, a
new girl in town, who comes in and upsets the apple cart for various
reasons. ... She'll be in every episode for the rest of the season. She's
played by a young Australian actress named Emilie De Raven. ... One of the
male characters in our show is sort of drawn to her, despite himself. And
it kind of creates some problems. ... It's too early to talk about [changes in
the writing staff]. We're just trying to get to the end [of the season]. I
have great writers working for me; for next year, we'll just try to put
together a staff that's going to be able to handle this particular show,
which is really about being able to embrace both genres, to write SF, but
to do it never losing track of the emotional center of the stories.
Do you have any plans for the hiatus?
Katims: I'll probably be sleeping a lot. ... I don't have anything else
in the works right now. We wrap shooting on April 12. ... If we get picked
up, we'll probably start again in late July.
Roswell has been described as a hybrid of your earlier show,
My So-Called Life, with The X-Files. How do you feel about
such characterizations? How did you approach the material?
Katims: That characterization is great as far as I'm concerned. I
feel like it's a series that has both a really strong SF element to it, and
also characters who are rich and diverse and three-dimensional. And we as
writers approach it by trying to service both things. ... We do so by
integrating the two genres as much as possible, so we don't feel like, "Now
we're going write an SF scene, now a relationship scene," but that both of
those are melded and activated at once. ... What I like about it is that the
SF element of the story and all of the mythology and the danger that
they're in all gives you a lot of great story stuff to play. But the fact
that we get connected to and invested in the characters humanizes the
stories so that they become emotional as well. That's what we've enjoyed
about the show when we write it.
How many of the episodes have you written yourself?
Katims: We have a staff. I will probably have written by the end of
the season ... a third of them. The way we do it is very much a
collaborative process. We all work together on stories, and go off in
splinter groups, and work on stories and scripts. So a lot of times, in TV
who gets credit is actually ... not always indicative of who did the writing.
But basically, we approach it from the point of view of working together.
Do you feel you owe something to shows that have come before, like
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel and The X-Files?
Katims: Definitely. Those shows have pushed the genre in different
places and allow for the possibility of shows like Roswell. I'd like
to think that Roswell has had the opportunity to ... move forward
because of those shows, but also that we're our own thing, and we exist in
our own universe.
How has the show evolved or changed since its earliest conception? Did
the chemistry among the young actors play a part in how quickly things
heated up romantically, or was that always the plan?
Katims: The thing that I really like about episodic TV is that ...
in a movie, there's just one story, and you work on that one thing. In TV,
you tell many stories, and it allows you to have your characters change and
grow and develop, and you see different sides of them. What's exciting to
me is when ... they sort of overlap ... and when the lines get blurred between
who your characters are and the actors who are playing them. We've had a
lot of fun basically drawing from when we ... see what the actors do, and see
their strengths, and see where they live. We have a lot of fun writing
toward that. ... That to me is an excitement and joy you get from writing for
TV that you don't get everywhere. ... The Maria-Michael relationship is the
most clear example. It's really fun watching Majandra [Delfino, who plays
Maria,] and Brendan [Fehr, who plays Michael,] in real life. ... The way they
relate to each other has all this great humor in it, and it's so charming.
It's something that we feel when we're writing it; we feel excited about
it, as there's such great chemistry between them. That didn't exist in the
pilot: It's something that developed over the course of the season. ...
[There's] not a lot of improvisation on the show. I'm talking about when
you hear the cadence of people's voices and the way they talk and relate,
you take that and use it in the writing of those characters.
Which character do you identify with most strongly?
Katims: It's kind of a tough question. It's kind of like asking a
parent, "Who's your favorite kid?" It's really hard to answer that in
terms of a favorite. ... I was obviously very drawn from the pilot and
continue to be to the deep connection between Max and Liz, and the
vulnerability that comes out of them because of that. ... Similarly, on the
other side of things, the idea of writing ... the scenes between Maria and
Michael, where they're so alive and have such a great sense of humor
between them, is also great. ... And similarly, the dynamic between Isabel
and Alex. Isabel, who ... seems on the outside to be so tough and strong, and
there's this wonderful vulnerability in the actress [Katherine Heigl]
that's under the surface that I love. And Alex has this incredible charm
that Colin Hanks brings to his role.
How do you feel about the strong fan and
Internet following? Do you like being lumped with Buffy the Vampire
Slayer and other WB shows in the teen area, or do you feel the audience
for Roswell is broader?
Katims: Unfortunately, I have little time to explore it. But we
definitely have a lot of people in the office who keep up with it and let
us know what's going on. I feel great about it, because it's so great to
get feedback and to know there are people who are interested in it. And
second, it's good for us, in terms of developing the stories, to know what
people are thinking. ... We know what people respond to ... and sometimes what
they don't respond to. ... I wouldn't look solely to the Internet, but the
general direction that we've gone is to move more into the mystery and
mythology of what's going on. It's been a natural progression for us, where
at the beginning of the season, it was more about the discovery of aliens
existing, and the weirdness of aliens existing in a normal place. But as we
move toward the end of the season and make all these discoveries, it
becomes a world that's a little more alien. [Now,] anybody who walks into
the show, you're not quite sure who they are. ... There [was] a fan party ...
which we're very excited about. Some of the people in our office arranged
for them to get a tour of the sets. ... When you do this stuff, you're working
in your little vacuum, and you're just this little company plodding along,
doing your shows. So to know that there are people out there who feel
strongly enough to ... get on a plane and come here and converge ... you get
a real charge out of [it].
Are there any plans for a feature-film version of the show? Has this
been discussed?
Katims: None that I know of. I think it's a little bit early for
that. We'll try to get the TV series going full force before we start
thinking about that.
