Courtesy of the Crashdown & BBC
Jason Katims - Creator, Executive Producer and writer of Roswell.
Starting out
How did you get into the television business?
I basically was a playwright in New York, a struggling playwright and I got a phone call kind of out of the blue from Edward Dewitt. He's a director/producer, and he had read one of my plays. He asked me if I was interested in writing for television and film and that's how I got out to LA and that's sort of where this all started.
Roswell was originally a young adult novel called Roswell High. Somebody from the studio showed it to me and I thought it just seemed like a sea of possibility, and the kind of story which would just naturally have this life, and there'd be a lot of stories to tell.
That's how I got involved with the project.
Literary roots
How much is the television series based on the Roswell High books?
Well the first book in the series was the one that I sort of fell in love with and that first book is what I based the pilot episode on.
So the pilot episode is very similar story-wise, and then I felt once we did that, it was a decision that I made just at that point let the series take on a life of its own and have it just become its own thing. So [the book] was very influential on the first episode and from there we just kind of riffed on it.
It was kind of interesting because while we were doing the series the series of books was still being written, so there were these two parallel universes going on at once. They became very different in weird ways. There were some similarities but that's how we approached doing the series.
Romance vs space-ships
Do you tend towards a more romance or more sci-fi driven theme to the show?
First of all, my background is very much in more character driven stuff, relationship driven stuff, and I've never really worked in the science fiction genre at all. So for me a lot of this was the learning experience of getting involved with that world and also coming to discover the possibilities and loving that aspect of the show.
For me it started out more from a character perspective and then we started to introduce more of the science fiction elements as I became more comfortable with that. We just tried to as much as possible combine the best of both worlds.
I feel the show is at its best when it is rooted in some universally relatable theme, something very human in fact, and we use the science fiction premise of the show as a way to differentiate it from other things that are out there. To add to this world something magical.
What happened to all that Tabasco?
Can you tell us about the impact of the fan campaign to save Roswell at the end of season one?
It did have an impact.
It was really interesting because probably about in the middle of the first season I became aware of this fan base out there. Until then I had no idea.
When you do a TV show you kind of are working in a vacuum, you rarely get feedback or know what people are thinking. Usually the only feedback you get is the Neilsen ratings, which is a highly generalised view and they're just numbers. Here we were getting real opinions and seeing the passion that people had for the show. While the show hasn't enjoyed a huge audience here, it's enjoyed a very passionate audience the likes of which I really haven't experienced before.
It was a little bit like that when I was working on My So-Called Life, it also had a cult following but [with Roswell] this is this passionate following but with an incredible sophistication.
The audience, because of the internet, has gotten really sophisticated, they know the business, because everything is sort of getting deconstructed they know what's going on with the ratings themselves. My joke is always "If I want to know what's going on with the network or if I want to know what's going on with the show I log onto the internet and find out from the fans".
So basically I think [the campaign] really did have an effect because we were struggling to find a big enough audience, but I think the network saw that the audience that had found the show was so passionate that there was the possibility for that audience to grow, that the show could eventually find a large audience.
So I think that the fan base and the fan campaign did a lot to help keep the show going.
Roswell Christmas Carol
Is there any Roswell episode that you think is a real top television moment?
To me the episodes that stand out are the episodes that are the most emotional. We do best when we find the human metaphor. [With] that idea of being an alien - we really get to the idea that in a sense teenagers are all aliens.
The episodes that I have really found have worked in that way are the pilot episode, which works really well because that's really, to me, Romeo and Juliet. It's really about two people meeting and falling in love, but not being able to be together, and I think it grabs you in that way.
Another episode we did, in the second season, A Roswell Christmas Carol is an episode that I really love and what's interesting in that episode that there's not a lot of story. It's just this very simple emotional story, where Max has to deal with this idea that if he has these powers to heal, what are his responsibilities to the world in using them.
It's an episode that I feel like I'm going to watch at Christmas, that I'll be able to get the tape out and watch it. At least for me personally it will be one of those Christmas movies that you watch to sort of get you into the spirit of the season.
Skin and Bones.
Can you tell us about writing Skin and Bones?
Skin and Bones was a difficult episode to conceive of and to do because [of the way] we had left the end of the season before with Destiny. I felt there were so many things to follow up in this next episode.
The battle for us was to try to follow up on that, to keep all those things going, and to get the audience grounded in what this next season was going to be about. In it we introduced the idea of the Skins, which is this other race of aliens out there, which I think is very intriguing. We are also sort of tracking all the relationships and how they have fared over the several months following the huge discovery at the end of the first season.
The other thing that happened in that episode which is interesting is at the end when Nasedo, who's the aliens' protector and supposed to be there for them forever, is really the only person they had, is killed. That was really the moment that launched us into the second season and got it started, because it was about [the Roswell Royal Four realising] not only is another race of aliens out there, but we don't have anybody to help us, we're on our own.
The End of the World
Tell us about the writing process for End of the World.
The End Of The World is also one of my favourite episodes of the show.
From a story point of view the show is working at its best when it starts with a very high concept idea. And [here] it's a very science fiction idea, which is that a version of Max from the future comes back to warn Liz away. Basically he comes back to tell her she has to break up with present day Max or else the world will end. It's a huge idea.
But what I love about it is it really becomes about a teenage girl trying to figure out what to do with her boyfriend. It's very relatable and you're very much connected to it. It really brought me back to what I loved about the very beginning of the show on the first season. For that episode at least, it just became about this young girl who was overwhelmed by this news, overwhelmed by what she'd gotten herself into, and I thought that that was really moving.
I particularly remember the ending of that episode when Liz has this dance with future Max after she's done this heartbreaking thing of making present day Max think that she betrayed him. She has this dance with future Max and as she's dancing he vanishes, and in that moment she and the audience realise that she's done it, she's changed the course of history. That version of Max 14 years from now will never exist.
To me that's one of the best moments we've done in the show. It's interesting and complex because she has been successful in what she's tried to do and yet in being successful she's lost both present day Max and future Max and their future together.
That episode is definitely among my favourites of the show.
Hallo, future me.
If you were visited by your future self, would you take their advice?
Well, I don't know because nothing like that's ever happened to me.
What's so compelling about this show is that it allows you to play out stories like that. Kind of like "What if?" stories, which is exciting. I've never done a show like that before and it's really great to be able to play into the fantasies of those kinds of things. What if you could see into your future, what if somebody from your future came back and tried to give you advice.
I just think those questions are fascinating and there aren't a lot of formats or genres that allow you to play in those arenas.
Heart of Mine
You also wrote Heart of Mine - tell us about that?
Heart of Mine is kind of a departure from the show. It was more like a classic teenage story, and didn't really have a big science fiction aspect to it.
What I really liked about that episode was it felt very real to me. I started to feel the relationships start to mature. Between Liz and Max especially, but also between Max and Tess, that triangle, and Liz starting to get the sense that there's somebody else out there with Sean. What I like about that episode is that it felt emotionally very complex and very real to me.
It was tonally slightly different, it was a little bit slower in pace, a little bit more internal than many of the episodes, but I felt that it was very successful and really was the thing that launched us into the final group of episodes from season two.
The Departure
Finally, what are your thoughts on The Departure?
The Departure is an episode that I'm really happy with.
I've never written an episode quite like The Departure before. We, the writers of the show, had so carefully planned out this four episode arc starting with Alex's death through to The Departure, so specifically that when I was sitting down to write the script I literally knew every scene.
You always do an outline, but then you get it and you start to write the script and you realise "Oh, let me do it this way". But with that episode, everything was connected to things that had happened before, which was great.
What I really loved about that episode was that we were able to deal with the question of "What if they could go home?" We had never really dealt with that before in a big way. So what I tried to do was, while keeping the plot moving along, to keep a lot of story time to deal with that idea. That was what was emotional to me, that was what was meaningful to me.
[There] was the idea of all of them having to say goodbye, forever, to this planet, and to people who they have come to love there, Max saying goodbye to Liz, and Michael to Maria, Isabel to her human parents. That's an aspect of the show I'm particularly drawn to and I was very excited to deal with that question.
Duped by the Dupes
Tell us about the concept of the dupes. Did you think that idea worked?
The dupes were the grand experiment of season two. I think we got mixed results with that.
We were challenging the audience and challenging ourselves with a very wild notion that we discover that there are these alternate versions [of the Roswell Royal Four]. There were two versions of the four pods that were sent down, so for each of the alien characters there's another version running around.
I was most tickled by the notion of looking at it as a study in sociology, because you have the group of pods that were raised in one environment in New Mexico, and then you have these other group of pods, and those guys grew up in New York and were sort of like the street version of our kids. So the most interesting part of it to me was the difference between the two of them.
It was really fun for me to watch, for example, Isabel have a scene with Lonnie, her alternative version, and see how the two of them would relate. I thought that was really fun.
I think that the other side is that it became almost too much for the audience to process. You're already dealing with a lot, which is there are four aliens, they crashed in 1947, they were in pods for forty years, they have protectors, there are people out there who want to kill them, other aliens, we're already dealing with a lot of information. I feel we threw a major curve ball at the audience, we took the whole premise of the show and sort of twisted it a little bit.
I have very mixed feelings about doing that because I think part of television is wanting to know the world that you're in and to have solid footing there. We did something that was very challenging and weird and strange, and it was a fun experiment to do.
I think that the cast were both really excited and really terrified of doing this. The way television works is, unfortunately, often you don't have a lot of time to prepare. In this particular case, for the first of those episodes, the script came in a couple of days before we had to start shooting. So we really threw something at the cast, which was just not nice of us to do because suddenly they were given a script where they had to create a whole new character for themselves, not to mention the challenge of doing an accent.
My hat is off to them for just jumping in and doing it and finding the characters on their way. I think you can see the difference in those two episodes. In the first one it was a little bit us finding our ground, the way you would do when you start a new show. Then in the second one I think that the actors were at a point where they could sort of dive in and have more fun with it.
Are aliens among us?
What's your own theory about what really happened at Roswell?
Well, this is not my area of expertise or background, and it was not even my interest before I started doing this.
It's a weird thing to come into as an outsider. It's really been fun and fascinating to start to learn about the history of it and about the people who are involved in it, who believe in it or don't believe in it. I haven't taken a side one way or the other but just enjoyed the fact that there's the mythology that we create about the show, but then there's a real mythology that exists about Roswell. I just love the fact that that exists and that you can call upon that in the show.
We did an episode in the second season called Summer of 47 where we go back to 1947. Some of the characters in that episode are based on real characters, and a lot of that episode is based on the so-called facts about what really happened, but then we mix it with our own mythology where we introduce the idea of the pods. So it's a hybrid between what was real and what the show is.
When I first started to work on the pilot, I went to Roswell, New Mexico on a research thing to see the sites and be in the town and go to the museum and the military base and all those things. Something that's great about being a writer is that you get to go into worlds that you normally would never have access to, or you would never really think about that much. It gives you an opportunity to really explore that.
The future of Roswell
How long do you see the show carrying on, and do you think it might go to the big screen?
I don't know. Personally I love the idea of a feature film.
Though I have thought a little bit about doing that at some point, the show is not yet at the point were there has been serious talk about that. I think that is something that will come in time if the show continues to be successful and to grow.
I'm very very hopeful and excited about the move to UPN, that we will not only bring our audience over from the WB but will continue to expand the audience. There's not a lot of shows where in the third year of the show not only do you get picked up for another season but you get re-launched.
The fact that we are on a new network means that we are going to have more promotion and more publicity than we would have if we were just returning to the same network, so I'm hoping that that results in introducing the show to new people and gaining some new fans.