Product Description

Studio: Tcfhe Release Date: 08/22/2006 Run time: 968 minutes Rating: Nr

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #7266 in DVD
• Brand: Twentieth Century Fox
• Released on: 2004-02-17
• Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
• Formats: Anamorphic, Color, Dolby, DVD-Video, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: English, Spanish, French
• Number of discs: 6
• Running time: 968 minutes

Amazon.com
Opening with a Dido theme song and featuring character-driven, sweet-natured melodrama, Roswell was a show with a surprisingly dedicated fandom, who twice won it reprieve from cancellation. One of its main strengths was, of course, the extent to which its premise--alien teenagers trying to sort out their identities while emotionally involved with their human contemporaries--was a free-floating metaphor for race and sexuality issues. Another was the strong ensemble that its cast developed: you believed in the strangeness of the alien trio and the well-intentioned normality of their three human friends. Jason Behr gave the alien Max a quiet authority and Majendra Delfino took the sidekick role of Maria and gave it both intensity and fine comic timing. It was also a show in which you were never sure which adults you could trust--William Sadleir trod a fine line of ambiguity as the local sheriff and Julie Benz was silkily sinister as an FBI agent. Anyone who ever loved this show will want these DVDs--and many others may want to find out what the fuss was about.

Roswell is presented in 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen. The special features include commentaries on six episodes by writer Jason Katims, the directors, and various cast members as well as a featurette on the making of the show and another on its adaptation from the original Roswell High series of young adult novels. The commentaries are unusually insightful on the casting process, and the discs also include the auditions for the part of Tess as well as a deleted scene and a music video. --Roz Kaveney

Customer Reviews

The BEST show ever!
This is the most amazing show ever to exist. I used to think Buffy the Vampire Slayer was my fav, and although I still love that show, Roswell outshines it even more. This show has the perfect level of sci-fi and teen relationships and difficulties. These teens have the usual problems which everyone can relate to in some way, yet they have to deal with being outsiders - literally. Everyone wants to feel like they are unique and that their lives are interesting, well, for the Roswell group this goes to the extreme. I have no idea why so many people were too idiotic to realize the genius of this show, so unfortunately it ended after a mere 3 seasons. In any case, these three seasons will hold my interest way longer than any other show can. If you want to see a mind blowing show that is truly "out-of-this-world" you won't be sorry.

Favorite Show of All Time
I remember watching this show when it originally aired. I was obsessed. Years later I saw the first season in a box set. Needless to say I got all three seasons and became obsessed again. This show is and always will be my ALL TIME favorite tv show. Long Live Roswell!

Two Clashing Genres
I remember watching this at the turn of the century when it first aired and liking it a lot. Naturally I was glad to be able to watch it again almost after ten years and see whether it has stood the test of time and whether it could still enchant the way it did. Thus, in this review I will concentrate more on the basic structural elements of the show and will write about the characters and performances in more length in my review for the second season, because it gives us the chance to see in retrospect the changes both in characterization and performance.

Now, we must begin from the very beginning. I admit that I dislike television for the sole reason of providing us with the nost unsophisticated blather imaginable. There have been intelligent things in the medium, but they have always been conceived by film peope (Fassbinder, Kieslowski, Lynch). Only in 1986 did the BBC production of The Singing Detective become the visionary staple for visual expression and narrative in television, followed closely by Kieslowski's Dekalog in 1988-89 and Lynch's Twin Peaks in the early nineties.

The latter was the greatest phenomenon in this respect because it reaeched out to the mainstream. Much of the things done in television nowadays tries to achieve, if they have intelligent makers, something of what Twin Peaks did, and I dare argue that without the show we would not have Carter's The X-Files. Needless to say, it is impossible to think of "Roswell", either as the book or television series without the two aforementioned shows.

The basic premise of the show is this: we want to create a mythological arc similar to the "X-Files" yet want to make it more accessible to teenagers and get rid of all the too-nasty stuff. What we do next is create a battle, a continuous friction between the two genres, the science-fiction mystery genre of all the drairy stuff (UFOs, goverment conspiracy theories, abduction, medical experiments, psychological instability, existential angst) and the idyllic teenager genre. The influence of "Twin Peaks" is visible here, as Lynch made a similar film to that in 1986 called Blue Velvet, an idea which he then transferred to television: to set two distinctive genres against each other and create the film (or television series) out of this friction. In "Blue Velvet" the genres were the crime genre with all the shady underworld dealings of sexual obsessions, violence, drugs and abuse, and the genre of the small town idyl. Of course, "Twin Peaks" is quite similar with the added mystery of the supernatural.

What we need then is a catalyst, the one substance that links the two genres together. The rest is a matter of balance between the two polar opposites, and most often we indeed balance between the two. In "Roswell", the link is, of course, the relationship between Max and Liz, or more accurately, the actions in the Pilot episode that lead to the exposure of Max's identity. Their relationship is the glue between the two genres, and it is only a matter of studio bosses' minds which way the show tends to lean.

Now watching it again I remembered the general story arcs throughout the season in only general detail, which allowed me to only trust on my feeling of nostalghia and the sense of exploration: it was as if I knew I had once liked what I had seen and now had the chance to experience the whole thing with new eyes. Now, several observations, advancing as chronologically as it is possible.

Firstly, the Pilot episode is absolutely thrilling. It sells the show, it is balanced, it forwards the implications of a further relationship between Max and Liz and it heavily implicates all the mythological elements the show could do in the sci-fi genre. It is in fact marvellous how much they were able to put in motion in the first episode. This is important, of course, even crucial, because obviously the success of what is to come depends on how many plates the creators have succeeded in putting into motion. In this regard the first episode succeeds marvellously.

It it might have been too marvellous for its own sake. Slowly the balance shifts and the science fiction elements are pulled out of focus and we enter the teenager-pleasing elements, which I admit I dislike strongly not only because it is so obvious when seen from the perspective of the two genres in friction but also because these moments reveal the worst pacing, writing and acting during the first season. It all peaks in "Heat Wave", in which we are in the cliché mode of television perhaps most prevalent in "O.C." nowadays, then in full force in "Dawson's Creek". We need to get out, because the problem with moving too far away from the sci-fi elements is to drag down the story-arc and bring the momentum gained from the Pilot to a standstill. The question is, of course, how to advance the sci-fi plot without losing the romance plot (which has put in motion the sci-fi plot in the first place). Well, the solution is to have something in the romance plot reinvigorating the sci-fi elements, and without spoiling it for those who have not seen it I will merely refer to is as involving flashes and images of faraway galaxies during the heat that makes your head spin. Either you admire the way the writers get away from the virtual standstill or you find it rather awkward. I admit finding it both of them.

Unfortunately the show still drags for quite a few episodes until we arrive to the explosive cataclysm of the sci-fi plot in the final six episodes. The sci-fi genre has now completely taken over, and it takes a visionary to end a season in style--to end anything, that is, yet with television the season is the second of the three endings we have (them being the endings of the episode, season and series as a whole). This is difficult because with television we have both the short form (40 minutes) and the long form (the whole season and the whole run of the series) with their beginnings and endings. It is problematic because they all have their inner structures, and they all have to make sense in relation to each other: the episode has to have a beginning and an end and some sort of meaning in itself, yet it has to have a meaning in the framwork of the season, which in turn has to be accessible from where we are standing, watching "Roswell" as an entity of three seasons.

I feel the final cliffhanger is very, very rushed, yet I suppose that is the price to pay when we spend much of the mid-season in the high school world. The function of a final episode is, of course, to answer enough unanswered questions from the first season, bring a resolution on some level and then introduce a new motif for the next season. In other words, we have to swipe the plate clean without losing something that connects the two seasons: that is, we cannot resolve all the problems and then introduce a new problem in the very end, relying only on that new problem to connect the two seasons.

This is how they have done it: they pretty much get rid of all the elements that have made the show what it is in the first season and especially during the final sci-fi eruption with Nasedo and Tess and the secret unit, and now they all just vanish away. We are then given a promise of a continuation, yet the result is quite anti-climatic. I do not argue that the decision to make a clear shift in focus here would have been a bad idea necessarily to begin with, as the new-found identities of our heroes are something valuable to build on in the future, but the problem is just that the writers sacrifice too much by giving too many easy solutions such as the capture of Pierce and the final assignment of Nasedo. They have built up the tension of people being on to the kids first with the sheriff, then with Topolsky, then with Hubble and finally with Pierce so well at this point that the final release of momentum is lackluster at best. I believe that a similar mistake was done with the ending of the first season of Desperate Housewives not so long ago. I believe it proves that writing for television is not as exact a science when it comes to the most crucial moments, structurally--the beginning and the end.

As for the burning question in the consumer's mind about which edition to buy? Well, the content is still the same whether you buy the 2004 or 2008 edition. The latter seems to be only a re-release simply to use the success of Katherine Heigl to cash in. Six discs in both of them, so no worries. Or then you can buy the three seasons all together.

With best regards,
Antti