'Jericho': One Week Later
May 23, 2007, 05:21 PM | by Marc Vera
Categories: Television
I am one of the many
die-hard Jericho fans who were distraught last week upon hearing of
the shows demise. And don’t get me
started about Kid Nation. It
doesn't take a genius to add things up: a reality show, with fame-starved kids
(I'm assuming, especially after watching the preview), costs much less to produce than a serialized drama that
actually has an intriguing storyline. I
guess CBS really is trying to harness that younger demographic, although I'm
not sure that pre-teens are the market they were aiming for. And while Jericho's ratings may not have been stellar, they weren't
horrible either (like the ill-fated 3 Lbs.).
Let's quickly run down what has happened since last week's announcement:
May 16: Right after CBS announced its fall schedule, the petition frenzy began, and the Jericho boards at CBS went crazy. Fan sites also immediately began a rallying cry on how to help keep Jericho on the air.
May 17: Our esteemed Mandi Bierly brought up Kid Nation on PopWatch, inspiring some 500 comments, most of them pro-Jericho.
May 18: CBS announced, "In the coming weeks, we hope to develop a way to provide closure to the compelling drama that was the Jericho story."
May 19: At the Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End premiere in Hollywood, Ashley Scott (pictured), who played Emily Sullivan, told EW's Carrie Bell how she felt about Jericho's cancellation: "It infuriates me. It is not fair to people who watched because we didn’t wrap it up because we thought we were coming back. Now viewers will never get a chance to know the whole story of the bombs and what happened or what is going to happen to these townspeople. It is just rude and I think people are going to stop watching shows like that because they keep getting shafted by these serials that they get into, then they get canceled and they never get any closure."
May 21: Nuts Online began taking orders to send to CBS. They have YouTube video and photos of the more than 10,000 pounds of nuts being delivered to CBS HQ in NYC. (Another 4,000 pounds were to be delivered today). SyFy Portal even interviewed Jeffrey Braverman from Nuts Online about the massive influx of orders. Why the nuts? It's in reference to the Battle of the Bulge tale Grandpa Green tells in the final episode, which Stanley mistakenly calls the "peanut story," in which the Allied commander replied, "Nuts!" when asked if he wanted to surrender to the Nazis. In the final scene of Jericho, when Constantino asks Jake if they are going to surrender, he replies, "Nuts."
And here we are now, a week after the cancellation announcement, with nothing firm. A friend told me that the season finale was supposedly written as a series finale in case the show didn't get renewed. At first, I didn't buy it, but as I thought about it some more, I realized it could work as a finale. While it left many questions unanswered, it also let your imagination run wild with possibilities. What was Robert Hawkins going to do with the tank? Who would get killed in the fight at the Richmond farm? Was the train full of the soldiers racing to the farm from Nebraska? If Darcy was right when she asked Robert about "eliminating all witnesses" (re: the nuclear bomb), wouldn't all of Jericho be doomed to die? How could the new government ever figure out who did or did not know about the hidden bomb? Are Skylar's parents still alive? And most importantly: Where was Jake for all those years?
If CBS does sum things up with a two-hour movie, I say, "Brilliant." The show was great, I loved it, but realistically, it's time to move on to other things. Do, however, count me among those viewers who won't get involved in serial dramas ever again. I got burned last year with NBC's Surface and this year with Jericho. I've learned my lesson.
What say you, PopWatchers? How long will the Jericho fight go on? Are you abandoning CBS for the long haul? What should happen now?
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