How much has Roswell grown into its own life as a TV series?
Mel The pilot and the first episode of season one have a lot of overlap and then they really have gone off in two different directions. They are alternative universes of each other.
I find it fun just to see what other writers did starting at the same point, to see what other people do with the same aliens and the same powers and the same basic relationships.
Laura It’s never occurred to us to compare the books to the show, because it’s a very different kind of story telling that you can do in a book versus on television. It needs to be so much more visual obviously on television and also, the books were for children.
Mel The books were for young adults.
Laura Sheriff Valenti is one of the characters that’s really different on the TV show versus the books, because in the books he was just pure evil.
Mel The books were for teens, and [in that type of book] you don’t usually give the adult characters their full back story.
Valenti felt this way because his father was obsessed with aliens. So he didn’t really have much motivation except being bad.
Mel He wanted to catch them, put them away and experiment on them.
Laura The show reaches an older audience and it’s fun to plot for these people as they’re getting older.
Mel [There’s] a lot of different kind of stories. And [the characters] are already older than they were in the books.
