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.
