Roswell, New Mexico Is What Happens When Teen Tropes Grow Up

Roswell, New Mexico has every trope and story twist you want in a classic CW show. There’s the sensitive-yet-brooding hot guy, the alpha female with a stunning downfall, love triangles, questionable half-sibling situations, and more. It’s the sort of TV that wraps around you like a warm blanket and understands exactly how to give you what you want, even as soon as what you want is more than a little bit outrageous. (Yes, I want a woman to explore her feelings with a mysterious and potentially dangerous alien — it’s true love!)


With its frequent flashbacks to the adult protagonists’ high school days with each other, the episodes are imbued with coded treasure maps, secret water tower-like spaces, and all of the nostalgia-inducing things you imagine bored teens in a tiny town did before Twitter and Instagram, once we may more with little effort concentrate on the here and now.


At the same time, all of those teen archetypes feel more mature once the show’s main story line is set in adulthood, with characters who are acutely aware of how their privilege affects them all, their mental and emotional states, and their generic animalistic desires.


We’re not just rooting for 18 year olds to get with each other before prom; we’re rooting for adults who are around the age that several adults get wedded. We’re not just seeing a teen struggle to come out to his father; we’re seeing how that teen’s closeted past influenced his future. And that gay teen’s jock bully? He grew up to learn that his behavior was abhorrent. Adulthood makes the stakes feel a number of steps higher than in the regular teen drama.


“It’s a little more adult content than we’ve been allowed to do in the past [on the CW], and thus I’m excited that we’re showing what people in their late 20s are dealing with realistically with discrimination or sexuality, and we just pose these questions that are most crucial to this generation and we push the envelope a little bit bit,” Heather Hemmens, who plays Maria, told MTV News.


With its seamless wavering between the organic world and in back of, Roswell, New Mexico delivers brilliant soapy, tropey TV tinged with adult sensibilities.


Last week, soon after Max (Nathan Parsons) unleashed his decade-long secret and complex to Liz (Jeanine Mason) everything that happened the night her sister Rosa (Amber Midthunder) died, Liz painfully declared she never wants to be able to see Max again — a true devastation considering just the week before, Liz admitted she felt safe around her alien hero and yes it began to seem possible that these two would finally get with each other. As a substitute, Liz entered an emotional freefall and Max was left feeling helpless.


Since we know Liz will visualize Max again — they reside in an impossibly small town and so they haven’t even kissed although, so there’s absolutely more to be able to see — we’re able give attention to digesting all of the new intelligence we learned: Max wasn’t Rosa’s killer (a classic red herring), his alien sister Isobel (Lily Cowles) had some sort of murderous mental break 10 years ago, and — the most terrifying segment of all — it seems like it can be happening again.


With Tuesday night’s episode (March 5), we'll officially pass the halfway mark for this season, and right now that we know what happened the night Rosa died, it feels like we’ve reached a turning point.


While Liz is on a hiatus from Max, rather than put all of our give attention to the sci-fi mystery, we’ll get a chance to dive deeper into the human side of the show, turning away from what happened in the past and toward what’s happening in the present with Maria, Liz’s steady partner in solving crime.


“Maria appreciates being the friend that each person can lean on, they can come to with their love problems and their work problems and she very much has that bartender vibe, where it’s like, ‘Here: sit down, have a drink, and spill the tea,’” Hemmens mentioned. “And right now we’re going to be able to see the truth of Maria’s heart. Her walls come down and we visualize what’s been going on in her own personalized life and the struggles that she’s been hiding from everybody.”


Right now, it’s Maria’s turn to tackle what occurs soon as a teen trope — the all-knowing best friend — grows up.


Ultimately, Maria’s humanity will only add to the supernatural intrigue. We already know she reads palms — however a look into her relationship with her mother will lose new light on what she may really be capable of, both emotionally and intuitively. “This is a peek in back of curtain, in the event you will, at setting up Maria’s story,” Hemmens teased.


And things for the locals-only bar owner will only pick up from there on. "She’s about to get her moment to just really break out of this small town experience that she’s had because she is aware deep down that she’s capable of so much more."


Roswell, New Mexico airs on the CW Tuesdays at 9 p.M. ET.