Thanks to Jaymz and P. for sending this in from the New Zealand Herald:<\/p>\n
How Tabasco sauce and e-mails saved Roswell<\/strong><\/p>\n
18.01.2001 By LOUISA CLEAVE<\/p>\n
Never underestimate the power of teenagers \u2014 especially when they\u2019re armed with Tabasco sauce. Tens of thousands of young fans of the alien drama Roswell are a major reason we\u2019re about to see a second series on TV2.
\nLast year, they launched a campaign \u2014<\/p>\n\u201cRoswell is Hot\u201d \u2014 which involved sending 6000 bottles of the fiery condiment to the American network executives who were thinking about cancelling the show after it failed to live up to their expectations.
\nFor those not familiar with the show, Tabasco sauce is central to the plot. Max, Isabel and Michael, the central characters, are aliens, supposedly the descendants of extraterrestrials who crashlanded in the New Mexico town in 1947. Is this the place where those, y\u2019know, blurry photos of alien autopsies come from?<\/p>\nAnd the Tabasco sauce helps the alien life-forms to digest human food. (It also helps most humans to digest food from that part of the world, but let\u2019s not go there.)
\nAlong with the sauce, the \u201cSave Roswell\u201d website forwarded 22,000 e-mails to Warner Bros network execs in what is thought to be one of the biggest and most effective campaigns to bring back a television show.
\nRoswell returned to US screens last October, giving Warner Bros some of its best ratings in its time slot since Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and earning the studio enough confidence to order another nine episodes to complete a 22-part second series.
\nTo attract new viewers \u2014 while trying not to lose the fans who saved their bacon \u2014 Roswell\u2019s producers decided to shift away from Dawson\u2019s Creek-style teen romance, particularly between Max (Jason Behr) and Liz (Shiri Appleby), towards a junior X-Files production.<\/p>\nIn last year\u2019s cliffhanger we found out that Max was the leader of his people, who were enslaved on their planet by alien enemies.
\nHe has been sent back in time with his young bride, Tess (Emilie de Ravin), his sister Isabel (Katherine Heigl), and friend Michael (Brendan Fehr) to fight the enemy and then return home and free their people.
\nExecutive producer Jonathan Frakes says the show will darken up and become more sci-fi in an effort to differentiate itself from other navel-gazing teen-angst dramas.<\/p>\n\u201cIt\u2019s no longer going to be a \u2018talk around the locker\u2019 high school show. The stakes are now life or death.\u201d<\/p>\n
There is greater emphasis on the otherworldly powers the characters possess. So far we\u2019ve seen them listening to CDs by holding them up to their ears, and healing fatal wounds.<\/p>\n
In this season\u2019s first episode Michael blows up small rocks by looking at them. It kind of pales in comparison to his new hairdo \u2014 a shaggy Jamie Oliver-type coif to replace his upswept spikes.<\/p>\n
Jason Behr, who plays Max, has reassured fans who are worried that Liz will reject him for good after learning that Tess is his \u201cdestiny\u201d at the end of last year and walking away to let them fulfil it.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe\u2019s had these feelings for Liz all his life,\u201d the actor says. \u201cThey\u2019re what got him and everybody else into the situation to begin with,\u201d he continues, explaining the first episode where he \u201chealed\u201d Liz after she was shot in a robbery. \u201cSo I don\u2019t think he\u2019ll give that up that easily, let it go without a fight. Nothing that great comes effortlessly. It\u2019s always a struggle.\u201d Roswell producers are also keen to hold on to the romantic connection between Liz and Max. \u201cWe\u2019re not throwing the baby away with the bathwater.\u201d<\/p>\n
Love matters aside, fans may be equally shocked to learn that the earnest Max actually cracks a smile or two this year, an expression that viewers were given a taste of when the character became a bit tipsy.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat was our way of trying to lighten him up,\u201d says Behr, \u201cand after that we tried to incorporate a little more humour into him. We\u2019re going to focus on that this year.\u201d
\nHeigl says Isabel \u201cwill come into her own as an alien.\u201d<\/p>\nShe adds that this does not involve turning into a little green woman.<\/p>\n
Heigl, aged 23, is the most experienced of Roswell\u2019s younger cast members, having acted alongside big-screen veterans Gerard Depardieu (in My Father, The Hero), Peter Fonda (in a TV adaptation of The Tempest) and action man Steven Seagal (as his niece in Under Seige 2).<\/p>\n
By comparison, Colin Hanks, who plays Liz\u2019s friend Alex, has a thin CV. He got his break in the rock-nostalgia flick That Thing You Do! but Roswell is his first television job.
\nBut who needs a fat portfolio when your dad is one of the biggest actors in Hollywood? Oh, and was the guy who made That Thing You Do!? <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Thanks to Jaymz and P. for sending this in from the New Zealand Herald: How Tabasco sauce and e-mails saved<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"colormag_page_container_layout":"default_layout","colormag_page_sidebar_layout":"default_layout","footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[294,125],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-1486","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-roswell","tag-roswell-saved","tag-tabasco"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crashdown.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1486","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crashdown.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crashdown.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crashdown.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crashdown.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1486"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/crashdown.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1486\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crashdown.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1486"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crashdown.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1486"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crashdown.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1486"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crashdown.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=1486"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}