CAN
TABASCO SAVE A TV SERIES? IN THE CASE OF A TEEN DRAMA, YES.
By Rick Bentley, the Fresno
Bee - 30/11/2000:
Susanne Daniels, WB
Network entertainment president had a close encounter of the e-mail
variety so intense she had to change her online address three times.
Fans of the network's
series Roswell - a Dawson's Creek meets X Files style
show - were hot about the fact the series was about to crash and burn
after only one year. The WB had no reason to have faith in the
show. It attracted an anaemic average of 3.6 million and ranked
134th of all shows last year.
Numbers were low, but
loyalty was high.
Fans flooded the WB
offices with letters and e-mails of protest. At least 6,000 of those
correspondents included bottles of hot sauce, a quirky trademark drink of
the alien cast.
"I've never
gotten anybody to send stuff that costs money," Jamie Kellner, WB
chief executive officer, says. His office received everything from
tiny sample bottles of hot sauce to one bottle more than a foot tall.
The result of this fan
support was the return of the show this year. A wise move.
This year there are a million more viewers each week and the show has
leaped to 89th place. That's a galactic hit in the WB world.
A couple of factors
have helped turn this story of strangers in the strange land of Roswell,
N.M., into a success. A huge leap was when the show shifted orbits
from the 9pm Wednesday time slot where it had gone head-to-green alien
head with UPN's sci-fi genre offering Star Trek: Voyager.
The other big change
was a swing from less coming-of-age stories to more blowing-up-the-world
tales. Roswell was transformed from a teen alien series to a
show about aliens who happen to be teens.
Katherine Heigl, who
plays the emotionally confused Isabel Evans, was never worried the
producers would completely abandon the human element of the show.
"That is what
makes the show so interesting. We are dealing with emotions on a
very human level. But we are not completely human. They are
not going to let go of that," Heigl says. In the same breath
she adds that the special powers to enter minds her character has are
equally as important. They add another dimension to the character.
Although she's only
21, Heigl has been in the acting business long enough to know how fans and
actors eagerly embrace complex characters. The Washington, D.C.,
native started working in front of the camera as a model when she was
9. Three years later she made her film debut in That Night.
It was the 1994
feature My Father, the Hero with Gerard Depardieu that brought
Heigl to national attention. Since then she has appeared in the
movies The Bride of Chucky, King of the Hill, Under Siege
2 and Prince Valiant.
Heigl plans to keep
working on films during breaks from the series. She has no problem
leaving her alien persona on the television series set.
"It was
interesting that the first day back to work on this season everything was
so familiar. I just slipped back into her skin again," Heigl
says. "That is what I love to act, why I love my job. I
am fascinated by the process of being able to play all of these different
characters.
"Every week when
I get the new script to this show, it is like a Christmas present to
me."
Those scripts often
parallel typical sci-fi stories with scenes of these young people just
trying to deal with life. If fan mail to Heigl is any measure, it
would be a disaster to forget that at the heart of the show is a group of
young people who feel different. They feel like they don't
belong. They are struggling to find their identities.
And then there are the
aliens.
Heigl has been told by
fans that they can relate to the emotional problems the cast faces.
It seems you don't have to have a birth certificate from Mars or Venus to
be young and confused.
"That is the
point of some of this, to make people realise they are not alone and that
our differences make us united in some way. It makes us realise we
are all good and bad at different things. We are different
races. We are different people. And we need to learn to
embrace that. That is the underlying theme of Roswell,"
Heigl says.
At a minimum, fans
will get to see that theme played out through this year. WB
executives have ordered enough episodes to fill out the rest of this
season for a total of 22. Each extra episode ordered can be
attributed to the hot mail-in campaign that amazed Heigl.
"It made us - the
cast and crew - realise that our efforts were appreciated. Their
Tabasco campaign put it into the WB's head that this show had a fan
base," Heigl says.
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