Outside of the current slew of smutty reality shows, JERICHO may turn out to be the most depressing series on television. Set in the small town of Jericho, Kansas (which looks a lot like Canada to me), this CBS series posits that nuclear explosions have rocked the United States and all contact between Jericho and the rest of the world is cut off. With mayor Gerald McRaney (DEADWOOD) and his prodigal son Skeet Ulrich (MIRACLES) leading the way, how will the townspeople cope with the fear and paranoia that accompany the isolation and the unknown? The pilot, directed by Jon Turtletaub (NATIONAL TREASURE), does a good job of setting up the premise and the large cast of characters, including Pamela Reed as McRaney's wife, Ashley Scott (WALKING TALL) as Ulrich's old flame, Lennie James as a wise black ex-cop from the Big City, Erik Knudsen as the wimpy kid from the other side of the tracks, etc. As with most Hollywood productions, the filmmakers have no idea what a small town in the Midwest is actually like, and not one of the actors sounds as though he or she could find Kansas on a map. The big question is, who wants to watch a gloomy weekly series about post-apocalyptic America? As an action/adventure or a fantasy series, JERICHO might be a better sell, but as a serialized tale of infighting and radiation sickness, I'm not sure it's something I want to subject myself to weekly, regardless of any quality it may have. How many times have you revisited THE DAY AFTER since its 1983 ABC airing? Can you imagine THE DAY AFTER: THE SERIES?

Well, I do; but then again, I find most hot&hip new series to be gloomy because they suck so hard. (God, if I ever have to sit through another episode of COLD CASE, kill me with a rock.) If JERICHO were to really record the fallout (literal and figurative) of a nuclear war on American soil, I'd be Johnny-on-the-Spot week after week. But I somehow doubt the show will have the stones for that.



I think it was Fangoria's Mike Gingold who had the best comeback to the ad art for JERICHO (I'm paraphrasing): "I wonder what it is that Skeet Ulrich is looking at that's more interesting than a nuclear mushroom cloud."

Well, in all fairness, RHS (and Mike Gingold), I believe if you look at a larger version of that ad art, there's another mushroom cloud behind the car, which is reflected in the side-view mirror. I actually thought it was a pretty striking image. Plus Skeet is soooooo dreamy...! And, well, calm, given the circumstances.

One purely subjective issue I have with this show: I think it will be quite a while before I can take Gerald McRaney as a benevolent father figure, since my bones are still chilled from his turn on DEADWOOD's third season.

But JERICHO sounds like one of the more interesting and ambitious projects on network TV and I might end up watching it someday if it lasts and gets good notices over the long haul. And as far as being too gloomy for the mass audience... I don't know, is it much more bleak and infighting-focused than LOST?

Buy some SIMON & SIMON DVDs, and your McRaney fears will be broken.

I never considered LOST to be a very bleak show, except for the fact that it's bad and I felt angry watching it. Stranded on a desert island with plenty of food, no cell phones and a lot of hot women. Strange how only the sexy passengers managed to survive the crash, except for one fat guy who is, of course, the comic relief. Gee, no cliche left unturned.

I attended the "Jericho" panel at Comic-Con and someone asked Jon Turteltaub if they were making it up as they went along or if they had a clear destination in mind with the show. Turteltaub indicated that they do know where they are going, at least in the short term. He was pretty evasive, of course, and didn't offer much in the way of details. But I liked the pilot and will definitely tune in for more.

I liked "Lost" in the beginning but I lost patience with it by the end of the first season. I get the feeling that the show's writers have no idea what they are doing from week to week or even what the underlying premise is.

I had the same feeling from five seasons of SIX FEET UNDER, a show I liked, generally-speaking, and enjoyed following... but so many of the narrative choices seemed arbitrary and the show jumped the shark for me with the resolution of what befell the character of Lisa Kimmel-Fisher.

I haven't watched a network drama in years.

When did they all get so freakin' grim?

I'm with you. Something like THE DUKES OF HAZZARD would actually feel like a breath of fresh air.

I'd say they got grim because for years, no matter how many people were killed and how much mayhem was committed, cop shows would end with the gang around the water cooler, their heads thrown back in freeze framed laughter at some joke at the expense of Adrian Zmed (just picking a name at random). People had a hunger for unrelenting cop drama... and boy we've had our fill of it, haven't we, over the last decade? I still like a good downbeat cop story, but shows like LAW & ORDER, COLD CASE, WITHOUT A TRACE and the CSI franchise have glutted me on grim posturing and glib immorality.

It all makes me want to go back to DRAGNET, the show that is probably the truest depiction of working cops ever made. Watching half of (the still terrible) CSI: MIAMI last night, I was struck by the reality that microscopic forensic detection is as much of a cliche today as was T. J. Hooker clinging to the hood of the villains' getaway car twenty years ago. I mean, how many criminal cases are really solved annually by linking particulate matter from the body of the victim to the killer? I'd say damn few.

Or even better, dig up some old MAJOR DAD episodes for the 'paternal McRaney' vibe.

I indeed don't find any of these "realistic" (i.e.,bloody, expensive looking) shows any more plausible or entertaining than "regular" tv, just more pretentious. I was watching one of the LAW & ORDERS the other night, and it was a decent episode, but I felt put D'Onofrio in a glow-in-the-dark blazer, paint the police station neon green, and hike up the female cop's skirt, and you've got SILK STALKINGS!

I found a write-up on the JERICHO panel at Comic-Con:

http://www.thefutoncritic.com/rant.aspx?id=20060723_jericho

This comment from Turteltaub is encouraging:

Spoilers












I watched it last night and found it to be cliched and lacked suspense. I can deal with cliches as long as the rest of it is good, but it wasn't. The writing wasn't terribly exciting and with the nuke going off only about 15 minutes into the show there was no time for any character development. And I certainly don't remember Skeet seeing that prison bus before he told the townspeople when he drove in, a rather large plothole, as was the gas bit. All in all, a big disappointment.

That being said, I thought the scene with the kid and the answering machine was great, as was the next scene where he told everyone where his mom was.

I found the show just okay and I really don't know if I would make it a point to be there every Wednesday night at 8:00 (which is roughly my daughter's bed time and usually finds me reading CHARLOTTE'S WEB or STUART LITTLE or the collected poems of E. Poe).

I like Skeet, who is aging nicely although the writers/producers felt the need to shave four years off his age. The rest of the cast is fairly bland and, at least at this stage, interchangeable. I like Pamela Reed as Skeet's mother but I just don't know about Gerald McRaney... he's just such a corny, affected actor a little too reliant on homespun vocal inflections.

I liked some of the setpieces; Skeet's road accident was nicely grim and the emergent tracheotomy was nicely particularized with the use of juicebox straws. Sad to see Leon Russom bow out so early.

Liked the dead crows... but I don't know, it just doesn't feel real enough to me. I guess we'll just have to wait and see which way the wind blows.

That's odd. From what I heard in the commercial (I didn't watch the show), there is only one bomb. :huh:

That's ballyhoo, pallyo.

There are other bombs, but only one that we can see (the 2nd that we know of explodes 1500 miles away). So, figuratively, the poster is correct.

CBS to "Jericho" Fans: You Win!
Posted Jun 7th 2007 12:40PM by TMZ Staff
Filed under: TV

Congratulations, obsessive "Jericho" fans -- you have officially broken CBS. The "canceled" show has been quickly resurrected and will be back in 2008, the network announced late yesterday. But CBS still needs your help.

Nina Tassler, President of CBS Entertainment, posted an open letter to fans announcing the decision and imploring them to now focus their attention on bringing more viewers to the show, saying, "We will count on you to rally around the show, to recruit new viewers with the same grass-roots energy, intensity and volume you have displayed in recent weeks." Doesn't CBS have a marketing department for that?

The show's fans had bombarded CBS offices with peanuts (a reference only fans of the show would get) as a form of protest. The tactic worked so well, Tassler closed her letter with, "Please stop sending us nuts :)"

No man, that "get the fans to do it" approach is pure "thinking outside the box" management that will save the company money because they can cut the publicity department! Just like most modern publishing companies have vastly decreased promotion and publicity departments and expect the writer to do it all his/herself.

Not to mention, CBS already has its excuse on a silver platter when they eventually cancel the show (again). "Hey, we gave them what they wanted, but they let us down."

What this really means is that CBS doesn't have anything better in development as a midseason replacement. I watched JERICHO twice, but gave up on it. When the second episode prominently featured a subplot involving escaped convicts taking hostages in a country house, I thought, "Here they have a show about the end of the world...and that's not exciting enough, so they have to shoehorn in an old MANNIX plot?!"

Not to mention the utter stupidity with which the story was told. The convicts jumped some local cops and stole their clothes and squad car. Then, while driving through the country, they stopped a local woman who had lived in Jericho her entire life and asked her for directions to the nearest gas station. So, #1 she didn't recognize the small-town cops as being strangers (she would know the whole force by sight) and #2 she didn't get suspicious when the cops had no idea where the filling station was. But Hollywood has never gotten the Midwest right.

I didn't have very high hopes for this show when it debuted - the first few episodes just set my teeth on edge (particularly when one character seemingly avoids radiation sickness after being caught out in fallout-laden rain by drinking iodine), and what minor virtues the show had were greatly outweighed by the flaws... but after their mid-season break, the show got MUCH better, in the writing and acting, and actually paid off on some of the set-up (a novel idea, that).

I wouldn't mind if the show continues past those 7 episodes for next year, but that will depend on CBS - I suspect that, like LOST, it does very well for its demographic and is a show that's recorded and watched later on, but CBS doesn't seem to be as committed to JERICHO as much as ABC is committed to LOST.

That could change, though... if the Networks continue to operate on getting big general audience numbers, that's going to kill a lot of shows. And with Reality Television giving off a rank odor of staleness, along with the sitcom, it's possible that the Quality One Hour Drama could be poised for resurgence.