Roswell Conspiracies: Aliens, Myths, and Legends.
While I didn't watch this series in its entirety until a couple of days ago, I had seen a few episodes of it back when it first aired in 1999 when I was little, but my mother told me not to watch it (funny enough, this was about the same time that I was secretly playing the original fallout, but it was actually harder to hide what I was playing on the computer than what I was watching on TV). I had been nostalgiaing hard while viewing the intros to cartoons from the nineties when I remembered some brief moments from the intro of this series. After getting the name of it from the helpful people at r/tipofmytongue, I watched the entire thing pretty much straight through.
As a series that I've never seen brought up, it's level of quality astounded me. It's a show about a guy hired by an agency known as "the alliance" which is tasked with controlling the aliens on an earth where all myths are true and they're all from outer space. Comparisons might be immediately drawn to Men In Black, but the show seems more like the x-files in that the entire show is driven by a bunch of conspiracy and mystery that builds over the course of the series. Unlike x-files, though, the show comes up with a very satisfactory answer to most of the questions that arise in the last few episodes. This can be good and bad at times, but I'd say that the series is, overall, better for it. The ensemble nature of the show also gives it a feeling somewhat reminiscent of StarGate SG-1, but doesn't have quite as much of a sense of discovery, nor does it build up quite as much of a universe.
It seems to suffer from the fact that it can't decide if it wants to be a kid's show or a show for young adults. In one episode, it explains away a bunch of missing people as having been in hibernation, but another episode simply accepts that everyone that disappeared from a town had been eaten, no "they were only being hidden" or "everything is suddenly better". On other occasions, the show very intelligently delves into the moral complexity of the premise that other shows might gloss over, only to slap a last minute "and that's terrible" asope at the end. The show has everyone conveniently eject from their blown up air craft in some episodes while another episode has the protagonist grapple a vampire into a rock dissolving laser which he then follows up with a bond one liner. There is a moment when one of the characters says "we are out of laser range" and uses EMP as a Phlebotinum that works fairly realistically in one episodes while causing anything and everything to spontaneously explode in another. Then again, a show about the protagonist punching the alien equivalent of vampires and werewolves in the face was probably never about authenticity.
With all that said, when it makes up it's mind, it's a really fun show. The show has quite few ass pulls to resolve conflicts as is to be expected from a kids show, but there are a surprising number of instances where the solution to a given problem is the result of careful plotting and use of previously established entities in the given context. During the finale, they raise the stakes so incredibly high that I was sure that some magical ring of power would appear out of nowhere, but nope, pretty much every problem was solved with something that they have previously shown on the show. A "where are they now" montage episode at the end would have made the ending far more satisfying, but the ending succeeds at what it tries to accomplish. From hilariously over the top montages of the protagonist punching people in the face, to the enormous helpings of "parental bonus" humor, to the ability of episodes to work both as stand alone as well as in the myth arc, to the show's awareness, the production team certainly did an impressive job.
Sadly, the only DVD release so far has only had episodes 1-20, but all of the episodes are on youtube. They're about twenty minutes a piece and there are forty in total.