This is turning out to be a weirdly good month for remakes of late ’90s/early 2000s teen-based dramedies with a modern day political twist; fresh on the heels of the new Party Of Five reboot—which will see the Sallinger family recreated as a clan of first-generation Mexican immigrants—The CW has announced that it’s bringing back its old extraterrestrial teen romance Roswell. (Meanwhile, that sound you’re hearing is a million “illegal alien” jokes suddenly bursting into existence in people’s brains.)
Given that Roswell was already a show about kids attempting to assimilate into a foreign culture while being hunted by unsympathetic authorities, it’s not like the new show’s producers had to stretch the premise super far to make it a fit for life in Donald Trump’s America. Still, per Variety, there are a few tweaks being made to make the new show feel extra modern, i.e. depressing. The new series will apparently center on a young woman who’s the daughter of undocumented immigrants, forced to return to her sleepy New Mexico hometown. Once there, she discovers that her high school crush is now a) a cop, and b), an alien with magical science-fiction powers. Cue a few terrorist attacks to really amp up the paranoia, and you’ve got the recipe for a lot of very heavy metaphors about the current American experience.
As with the original show, the new Roswell is being based off an original book series, Melinda Metz’s Roswell High. Carina Adly MacKenzie, an alumnus of The CW’s The Originals, will write and executive produce.