Creator Jason Katims on the Alien Drama

In the fall of 1999, Jason Katims and his new teen drama series “Roswell” just barely survived the now-antiquated baptism by fire that was the broadcast TV pilot season.

It wasn’t that many years ago that broadcast networks produced dozens of new shows, picked the ones they thought might succeed and presented them to advertisers at the May ritual of the Upfronts in New York City. The process still happens annually, but it isn’t like it used to be. “Back in those days, it was this mad scramble where things could change drastically in a matter of hours,” Katims tells Variety. “At the time, I thought this was such an absurd system. Now I long for it, because you knew right then whether your show was going to go ahead, and you had to immediately get into production to get it on the air and put something in those time slots.”

In the years since, Katims conquered that mad scramble with beloved series including “Friday Night Lights” (for which he won an Emmy) and later “Parenthood.” But 25 years ago, “Roswell” was a tougher sell.

Originally developed and shot for Fox, the series follows Liz Parker (Shiri Appleby), a high school student living in Roswell, New Mexico, a town made infamous by the supposed crash of a flying saucer in 1947. In the opening moments of the pilot, Liz’s waitressing shift at the Crashdown Cafe is interrupted by gunfire and she catches a stray bullet to the chest. But before she bleeds out under the coffee machine, she is miraculously saved with a single touch by her quiet, handsome classmate, Max Evans (Jason Behr). Liz isn’t quite sure how Max made the bullet in her chest disappear until he reveals he is one of those aliens that crashed in 1947, who awakened years later —they now live as superpowered but otherwise ordinary teenagers. A pre-”Grey’s Anatomy” Katherine Heigl and Brendan Fehr play his fellow martians, Isabel and Michael, respectively.

Up to that point, Katims had only worked on two series –– as a writer on three episodes of the late-great “My So-Called Life,” and as creator of the short-lived drama “Relativity.” But under his overall deal at 20th Century Fox Television, he was given the source material for a potential development project: the first “Roswell High” novel by Melinda Metz, who eventually worked as a writer on the series.

“I really fell in love with the idea of that story, and these characters,” he says. “I was not somebody who had ever written genre pieces, and I haven’t done much since. But I was very drawn to the idea of using aliens and alienation as a metaphor for adolescence. It was also a love story with a true obstacle. It is a writer’s dream to do a story like ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ where your characters can’t really be together. A girl falling in love with an alien? I just loved that about it, and I still love that about it.”

The pilot tested through the roof for Fox, and the team was thrilled with the prospect of getting a spot on the fall schedule going into Upfronts. But television is a fickle industry. “It came really close,” Katims says. “We really thought it would make it. But when they said they were going to pass, somebody slipped it to The WB within a few hours. It happened so fast, but a few days later, it suddenly became a show for The WB.”

It made sense. The WB was in its heyday of similar young-adult shows like “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “Dawson’s Creek.” “Roswell” was the perfect blend of those two shows, even though Katims was proud that, at least initially, it struck the right balance between its human and extraterrestrial identities.

“I think we tried to be brave storywise,” says Katims, who served as showrunner. “We tried a lot of different things. In one way, it was a kitschy show. These teen aliens were drinking Tabasco sauce by the bottle! But there was a lot of pain in the show too. There were moments that I thought were deeply emotional and poignant.”

Appleby had largely been a guest actor on shows like “Xena: Warrior Princess” and “Beverly Hills, 90210” when she landed the role of Liz, the character that Katims found most interesting in the initial concept for the show. But it was the role of Max that came down to the wire. It was one of the final days before filming began, and they had seen seemingly every actor in Los Angeles for the part. But Katims remembers they were waiting for Behr.

“We had heard about him, but he had been sick and had lost his voice,” Katims says. “When he finally came in, it was myself and David Nutter, the director. Once he read, I just remember knowing immediately. And then there was a bit of panic about whether the audition really was great — or was it because he had this gravelly voice from being sick? Luckily, he was still great when he got it back.”

Alongside Appleby, Behr, Heigl and Fehr, the show starred Majandra Delfino as Liz’s motor-mouthed best friend, Maria; Colin Hanks (son of Tom) in his first role as their inquisitive friend, Alex; and William Sadler as Roswell’s hard-boiled Sheriff Jim Valenti. Katims also called up his friend Richard Schiff for a guest-starring role in the first three episodes as an FBI agent. But Schiff’s time on the show was limited by his debut on another new show just two weeks earlier –– “The West Wing,” which aired on NBC in the same timeslot as “Roswell.”

“Roswell” premiered on Oct. 6, 1999, directly after “Buffy.” Its early days were focused heavily on Liz’s grappling with the dangers posed by Max’s revelations, coupled with her undeniable feelings for him and the fallout of what sharing his, Isabel and Michael’s secret really meant for these outsiders. Katims preferred that grounded small-town approach to the story, that kept the galactic implications of the aliens’ origins just out of arm’s reach. But they still had fun winking at the absurd culture around alien-hunting, staging conventions with guest stars like “Star Trek: The Next Generation” star Jonathan Frakes (who also directed a Season 3 episode).

The fan response to the show was immediate. Online message boards lit up with theories about every aspect of the show, from the love stories to the alien mystery –– an intense engagement that wasn’t as common then as it is today.

But fan attention was also a constant reminder for the show’s creative minds that the devil is in the details. In one episode, where the characters were translating and printing out alien scripture, Katims acknowledges they had to be careful with their props. “We had to think about what was on the pages being printed out because fans would take a screenshot of it and analyze it,” he says. “We couldn’t just put some bullshit out there. They kept us honest.”

But as the first season rolled out, an evolution was already on the horizon. “At some point, someone told me, ‘The head of the network has a note for you,’” Katims says. “You don’t usually deal directly with the head of the network, so I was very interested to hear what it was, but all the note said was, ‘Aliens, Aliens, Aliens.’”

Ratings for “Roswell” weren’t the best, so the network wanted Katims to steer the story directly into the genre wave he had been holding at bay, and let the stranger-from-a-strange-land mystery take precedence.

“At first, I did it reluctantly, because I had my own idea of what the show was,” he says. “In the first season, you are constantly still figuring out what the show is. You never really stop figuring out what a show is, especially when your show has this ‘Dawson’s Creek’-type teen drama mixed with a bit of an ‘X-Files’ danger element. But we were told we have to embrace the aliens, and so we did. When you look back at the show, especially the posters from Season 1 to Season 3, you can see it becomes less about this young human girl and her story, and more about what it is like for these three aliens — and eventually more — living on Earth.”

An expansion of the mythology is already noticeable in the final stretch of the first season. A new alien is introduced in Tess (Emilie de Ravin, who would later co-star on “Lost”), whose power to warp minds becomes a real threat to the gang –– and her primal connection with Max muddles the show’s central star-crossed relationship. The characters also start hunting for more traces of their extraterrestrial origins in Roswell’s Indigenous history, a storyline that wades deep into dense mythology.

That narrative shift is immortalized on a shelf in Katims’ office today. As he reflects on this period in the series, he gets up to grab a small but sturdy book made of copper that visibly wears its weight. To any fan of the show, the metal book is immediately recognizable.

“You would be shocked at how heavy this thing is,” he says, as he familiarizes himself with it again. “This was a prop made for the show that the characters find. It tells the whole legacy and the language, and everything about where our aliens really came from. We got so deep in it that we literally wrote the book on it.”

The network’s mandate worked to a degree. Despite middling ratings, the fans rallied for “Roswell” in ways that had never been seen before. The aliens’ taste for spice, satiated by dousing their human food in Tabasco, inspired a campaign to save the show from cancellation. Thousands of bottles of the hot sauce were sent to The WB to serve as irrefutable proof the audience was out there. While present-day fandoms can drift into toxic forms of support and debate, Katims remembers “Roswell’s” fans to be a good-natured collective.

“It was just an amazing thing to happen,” says Katims, who still received bottles of Tabasco for years after the show ended. “The head of The WB would tell us about how his offices were full of boxes of Tabasco. It was such a clever thing to do, and it was such an innocent time. It was just fans who had this love for the show and they were able to come together around it.”

But the fans’ support wasn’t without its criticisms over the show’s narrative changes. Katims, of course, agreed with them on that front. But he got a major assist in marrying his vision and the network’s sci-fi mandate in Season 2 with new executive producer Ronald D. Moore, who was coming off years with multiple “Star Trek” series and would go on to create genre landmarks like “Battlestar Galactica” and “Outlander.”

“When Ron came on the show, I think it really helped me learn about how to think about genre shows,” Katims says. “That is so organically how he thinks of story, and his stories are all deeply human. He was very brave and adventurous in thinking about ‘Roswell,’ and he really uses the genre to consider the human condition through metaphor — and that’s what I wanted when I first started this show. That got me more excited about the evolution of the show, but at the same time, I mourned my original vision of it. It just wasn’t that show anymore, you know?”

Despite storytelling Katims says he is proud of, Season 2 wasn’t as favorably received by fans. Among the complaints was the decision to break up Max and Liz, and give Max and Tess the spotlight (and a baby) for the majority of the season. Ratings continue to slide and The WB canceled the show in 2001. Fortunately, the now-defunct UPN was in the market for established content to fill its slate, and it picked up both “Roswell” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” for Seasons 3 and 6, respectively.

Season 3 of “Roswell” isn’t as densely packed with mythology, and even returns to the high school stories that defined the early days. But it continued to up the stakes of the show, introducing time travel and even teasing the possibility that Liz, the human character Katims had first been drawn to, might be developing superpowers of her own. In May 2002, UPN announced that after 61 episodes, the show wouldn’t get a fourth season. It closed out with an episode centered around high school graduation that offers the gang and the stalwart fans a rather happy ending, even though they flee Roswell under the threat of FBI detainment.

It was a nice button to put on a show that had taken itself to wild places in pursuit of that elusive sweet spot Katims says he was always chasing. A quarter century later, Katims looks back fondly on the experience of the series, calling it his own “coming of age as a television writer and producer.”

“The two shows I had worked on before this, they only went one season, and they were abbreviated,” he says. “With ‘Roswell,’ I was on my own. I didn’t have a protective layer around me. It was me learning to be a showrunner in the real world and not the fantasy world, which, I know, sounds ironic given the show we were making. But it is true. I didn’t have my mentors and protectors around me. It’s where I grew up as a showrunner.”

He recalls getting his first exposure to the collaborative process among writers, directors and below-the-line crafts. It’s where he got his first taste being the person everyone comes to. “It’s the day-to-day mishegoss of running a show — like just how many conversations we had about hair. These young actors wanted to change their hair all the time. But continuity matters!”

Warner Bros. Television resurrected “Roswell” for The CW in 2018 as “Roswell, New Mexico.” It featured the same characters, but stayed away from the high school setting. It was a modern, progressive take on the source material. But Katims was not involved in the show, which ran four seasons.

“I didn’t watch it,” he says. “It was strange the way that whole thing happened. There was a reboot that was not part of the same studio, and myself and none of the people who made our show were a part of.”

Appleby was the only major name from the original to be part of the reboot, directing two episodes and appearing on-screen in a few others, including the series finale.

For Katims, “Roswell” is that brief moment on the cusp of a new millennium. It was not unlike the cave-dwelling pods that housed Max, Isabel and Michael after the 1947 crash. It gave him a place to grow until it sent him out into the world of TV as a full-fledged showrunner. As he reckons with the 25 years that have passed since those chaotic days of uncertainty in the fall of 1999, he thinks back to his first trip to the real Roswell for inspiration while writing the pilot.

“I realized pretty quickly we had to invent our version of Roswell,” he says with a laugh. “It wasn’t like ‘Friday Night Lights,’ where it feels like you’ve been dropped down into this real world in Texas. Those towns are real. But Roswell is different. We invented that [inescapable] obsession with aliens that our Roswell lived with every day, and I still love that part of it. That idea that it is this place where people come to indulge in this ridiculous thing –– and yet, it was all true.”