Jason Katims Longs for TV’s Pilot-Season Days

The ones that brought us "Friday Night Lights" and "Parenthood" but almost killed "Roswell."

TV‘s production cycle just ain’t what it used to be, and creator Jason Katims is feeling nostalgic.

You can’t blame him: When Katims spoke with Variety recently, the topic was the 25th anniversary of his teen drama “Roswell,” which had been intended for Fox but ended up on The CW predecessor The WB.

Katims waxed poetic about the days when May’s TV upfronts actually mattered.

“Back in those days, it was this mad scramble where things could change drastically in a matter of hours,” Katims said. “At the time, I thought this was such an absurd system. Now I long for it, because you knew right then whether your show was going to go ahead, and you had to immediately get into production to get it on the air and put something in those time slots.”

Oh man, remember time slots? (OK, we know linear television still has a schedule, and we still cover the upfronts — kind of.)

In the days ahead of a network’s upfront, many decisions on pilot pickups, renewals, and cancellations are still on the table. Double that before the streaming era.

“It came really close,” Katims recalled of the crunch time in May 1999. “We really thought it would make it. But when [Fox] said they were going to pass, somebody slipped it to The WB within a few hours. It happened so fast, but a few days later, it suddenly became a show for The WB.”

Cue the “Happy Days” theme song, we guess.

So The WB became Katims’ savior — and then soon became a thorn in his side. When early viewership proved elusive, the network instructed the young showrunner to lean harder into the show’s mythology.

“At some point, someone told me, ‘The head of the network has a note for you,’” Katims said. “You don’t usually deal directly with the head of the network, so I was very interested to hear what it was, but all the note said was, ‘Aliens, Aliens, Aliens.’”

“Roswell” was based on novel “Roswell High,” which followed teens — some human and some alien — in the town made infamous by the supposed crash of a flying saucer in 1947. “Roswell” starred Shiri Appleby and Jason Behr, and brought us Katherine Heigl and Colin Hanks.

Katims he followed the instruction “reluctantly.”

“In the first season, you are constantly still figuring out what the show is. You never really stop figuring out what a show is, especially when your show has this ‘Dawson’s Creek’-type teen drama mixed with a bit of an ‘X-Files’ danger element,” he said. “But we were told we have to embrace the aliens, and so we did. When you look back at the show, especially the posters from Season 1 to Season 3, you can see it becomes less about this young human girl and her story, and more about what it is like for these three aliens — and eventually more — living on Earth.”

“Roswell” only made it those three seasons, ending in 2002. Katims would stay in high school four years later with “Friday Night Lights,” for which he won an Emmy. And then he grew up with “Parenthood.”