Roswell succeeds brilliantly at recapturing what adolescence was like, and it does this by fusing the teen experience with decades of accumulated mythology about aliens among us, making it, in the words of Variety reviewer Laura Fries, truly "a cosmic blend of high school angst and otherworldly intrigue."

For starters, the show's teenage characters are utterly, charmingly irrational, as I now realize we were when we were that age. As befits creator Jason Katims' previous work on My So-Called Life, these teens are authentically portrayed as spending most of their time freaking out, obsessing over trivialities and generally behaving as though their brains had been painstakingly calibrated with the wrong tool.

As I remember it, that pretty much sums it up. It was really like that: the paranoia, the angry accusations, the wild mood swings, the pointless hyperactivity.

However, this is more likely a conscious creative decision on the part of Katims and director David Nutter. We've all seen TV pilots that force-feed viewers big, indigestible hunks of Character Detail in order to make sure that everyone's on the same page and the guiding precepts laid out in the series bible have propagated to the audience.

Katims and Nutter could have served up such a labored feast of backstory outlining who Liz is, exactly what her relationship to the Crashdown Cafe is, and what their town of Roswell is like. They don't. The result, deliberate or no, is a rather artful reminder of what it's like to be an adolescent, before the decisions and accidents of adulthood tie the world (and our own identities) down.

Of course, all this vagueness and irrationality may turn off less sympathetic adult viewers, but I doubt that Katims and Nutter were trying to win the crowd that now finds The Catcher in the Rye fatuous and pointless, anyway. The important thing is that teenagers who watch the show will see people they know reflected back to them.

Meanwhile, while Liz, Maria and company are often too busy freaking out or lying unconvincingly (again, an authentic detail I remember only too well from my own misspent high school career) to provide the clever canned speeches that infest other Generation Y dramas, the banter is still head-and-shoulders above the pack.

When it's in the best interests of Katims' story, these characters can whip off wisecracks as sharp as anything this side of Buffy, and it's this welcome edge of sarcasm that keeps Roswell from drowning in the maudlin self-pity of those shows I don't like (no names, they know who they are).

The inclusion of genre mainstay Jonathan Frakes also provides a touch of the absurd that would be out of place in a show that takes itself too seriously. On Roswell, however, there's plenty of room for self-parody, and so Frakes' portrayal of himself (as a jaded, slyly bloodthirsty icon of Star Trek fans and UFO geeks alike) works.

In Roswell, the aliens -- or the Star Trek celebrities, or the teenagers -- are always there, right under our noses. They look just like us, have the same good points and bad points, strengths and insecurities.

Nutter has gone on record as saying that one of the show's guiding principles is that "teenagers are the aliens among us." Like aliens, adolescents are strangers to the adult world that they have only recently been allowed to visit. Like aliens, they struggle with the drive to fit into the crowd by excising everything that makes them different, but, like Roswell's aliens, teenagers also want to express themselves, to stand up and be counted as being as central to human life as anyone else.

If teenagers are aliens, then every town is Roswell and, from a certain point of view, we all grew up in New Mexico, where the skies are filled with strange and perplexing things.