Roswell
Alien teens hiding in plain sight in a New Mexico high school — sci-fi wrapped in teen romance, set around a kitschy diner where everything came doused in Tabasco. It only ran three seasons, but its fans mounted one of TV's most famous save-our-show campaigns, mailing bottles of hot sauce to the network.
Jason Katims developed Roswell from Melinda Metz's young-adult book series Roswell High, and it premiered October 6, 1999, on The WB with Shiri Appleby as Liz Parker, Jason Behr as Max Evans, Katherine Heigl as Isabel Evans, Brendan Fehr as Michael Guerin, Majandra Delfino as Maria DeLuca, and Colin Hanks as Alex Whitman. The premise was irresistible: Liz waitresses at her parents' alien-kitsch diner, the Crashdown Café, in Roswell, New Mexico — tourist-trap ground zero of UFO lore — and discovers that the quiet boy who just saved her life is an actual alien hiding in plain sight, and he's not the only one.
The mythology deepened as the teens uncovered each other's secrets while government threats closed in, but the texture is what fans remember: the Crashdown's alien-themed menu, the doomed Max-and-Liz romance, and the aliens' trademark quirk — dousing everything they ate in Tabasco sauce. Dido's "Here with Me" opened the episodes and became inseparable from the show.
The hot sauce is also how the fans fought back. After a shaky first year, a fierce fan-driven campaign shipped bottles of Tabasco — the aliens' condiment of choice — to the network's offices; the show got its second season, and veteran sci-fi writer Ronald D. Moore came aboard to sharpen the science fiction. The WB still let it go after season 2 in May 2001, but Roswell found a third-season home on UPN (October 9, 2001 – May 14, 2002), closing out at 61 episodes. Short run, long shadow: for a certain corner of fandom, the Crashdown Café never really closed.
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