Roswell started out pretty good - there was an intelligent sense of humor at work, and the characters came off well. But then it turned into being all about the alien nonsensical drabble and the characters started getting dumber. It was similar to the X-Files - they were over-ambitious with the big alien story, and then mucked it up trying to reveal it over the course of several seasons. For me, the series started to die the moment Liz said to Max, "You're an alien kink(king)."

Roswell had its moments. One of which was the S2(?) finale, where it pulled me out of a great deal of disgruntlement.

Mostly it was a dizzying mess I was just watching for Michael and the sherriff and his son.

Yeah. The alien stuff was much better as a suggestive mystery than as stuff they could actually pursue. The reveal is never as interesting as the imagination. And then it turned out that almost everyone in the entire state either was an alien or was possessed by one... too bad. They should've just left it alone.

Mostly it was a dizzying mess I was just watching for Michael and the sherriff and his son.

Porno! And the Jock Who Found Buddha!

Plus there was the fun of watching Isabel. But yeah, they started off with being an alien as a sort of metaphor for feeling isolated and scared as a teenager - the drama came from the three aliens trying to hide who they are from the world, forming their own codependent little family, struggling with the idea of relationships with the outside world. I think if they'd slowed down the addition of information about their home world, and maybe had the kids figure out some stuff on their own, it would have helped.

I did enjoy the whole EvilDoppelgangerAliens thing, in a sort of "Oh, the show's already gone to hell" kind of way.

Oh, it's Max From the Future, who comes back in time to break up Max and Liz in order to Save The World!

And there was this whole, "On our home planet, we're royalty, except we all fight each other, and we lost power anyway, and how the hell are we supposed to go back since these human bodies were built for us to just live on Earth?" I mean, it reminded me of how kids like to fantasize that their "real" parents are out there somewhere, and they're rich or famous or nobility and just waiting to whisk them away to a better life.

"Sliders" dipped into the monkey crack after the first season or two, and it snorted constantly until the very end.

Oh, but I have so many fond college-era memories of this show! Especially when it was the lead-in for X-Files, so twenty or so of us used to warm up by mocking Sliders ruthlessly. So much fun. ("Look! This week they're doing a takeoff on Anaconda!")

It was like they came up with a nifty idea, and then let a bunch of 13-year-olds write the plots from then on in rotating shifts. Alternating boys and girls.