ROSWELL, NEW MEXICO
Why Roswell, New Mexico is a sci-fi reboot for our times
It was a weather balloon, folks. Just a weather balloon. Move along.
Twenty years ago, Roswell (or Roswell High as it was also known) was an early hit for the fledgling The WB, the network that made its name in the late ’90s/early ’00s with the teen-friendly likes of Buffy, Dawson’s Creek, Charmed and Smallville. Based on Melinda Metz’s Roswell High YA book series, it starred Shiri Appleby and Jason Behr as a human high school student and an alien who fall in love in the titular New Mexico town long synonymous with ETs. Now the premise is back in a revisionist adaptation called Roswell, New Mexico, which puts the character of Liz Ortecho (Jeanine Mason) at the centre of a small-town story rife with family drama, murder and yes, interstellar romance.
New showrunner Carina Adly MacKenzie (a former writer on The Vampire Diaries and The Originals) admits that while she was a fan of the original series as a 12-year-old, she had no interest in making the same show in 2019. Instead, she wanted to explore older characters dealing with real life issues. “I think people talk about the cusp of adulthood being 18, but in my experience, being on the cusp of adulthood is being 28,” she tells Red Alert. “Maybe that’s a factor of being a millennial, but that’s when I really felt like I had one foot in childhood and one foot in adulthood, and I really wanted to tell that story. So, when I went in to pitch Roswell, New Mexico, I said, ‘They’re grown-ups. One is a cop, it’s a small-town murder mystery, and oh, yeah, aliens!’”
The network loved her vision and together with executive producer Julie Plec (her former boss in the Vampire Diaries universe), crafted a series that MacKenzie hopes honours the classic series in spirit, but not in deed. “The original show resonated to me so well because in high school everyone feels alone and like a freak,” she explains. “But I wanted to take that and raise the stakes of it because in adulthood, particularly right now in this country, feeling alone and like a person without a community means something different than it did in high school. Not necessarily higher stakes, because what represents high stakes in high school is different from high stakes as an adult, but
They’re grownups, it’s a smalltown murder mystery, and oh, yeah, aliens!
that’s what I wanted to play with. I hope people see the heart of the characters they loved so much but don’t go in expecting them to be the same. I don’t think our versions of the characters are better or worse, just different. I hope people feel we are trying to honour it rather than replace it.”
Even back in 1999 the show’s “whitewashing” of the books’ Latin lead characters did not go unnoticed, and two decades on that’s being rectified with a Latina lead. We’ll also see a more 21st century approach in the way the sci-fi elements of the story are mixed with real-world issues like racism and immigration.
alien nation
In particular, Liz Ortecho is a complicated protagonist who has been away from her family and home town for a decade. An accomplished scientist, her world view is up-ended upon reconnecting with her former crush, and now long-time Roswell police officer, Max (Nathan Parsons). Liz discovers that Max is an extra-terrestrial living among us, while she herself comes from an undocumented family – cue plenty of opportunity for allegory and metaphor as it turns out her alien-ness is on point with Alex’s.
MacKenzie says she and her team of writers take the diversity of their characters and cast very seriously. “We talk a lot about Liz, who is a Latina and the daughter of undocumented immigrants. And she’s not the only Latin character on the show. We also have Michael Trevino who plays Kyle Valenti. He played a white character on The Vampire Diaries but he is 100% Mexican. He provides another perspective of a family who did immigrate legally, and those perspectives are not necessarily the same. We’re trying to open up the world and include different points of view and tell stories that make people feel heard.”
She also admits to leaning into Twitter and social media to navigate the narrative of her series. “I think people like to put down social media and turn up their nose at millennials being on their phones all the time, but through it we’ve gotten the opportunity to hear stories from people across the world that we never would have been able to reach. I think a lot in my writing about how Twitter is going to respond because it’s become the checks and balances for art. They will tell you if something is problematic, which is good. We’re telling stories about race, immigration, sexuality and gender so we are definitely going to step into territory that is scary so I try to look at it from the perspective of Twitter a lot, and hope I am telling stories that make people feel included.” TB
Roswell, New Mexico debuts on The CW in the US on 15 January. UK broadcast is TBC