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With one episode left to air next Tuesday, fans of CBS' Jericho find themselves in the same position they were at the end of the series first season - wondering why a show with excellent writing and acting, a unique premise with underlying messages of patriotism, family and love for one's home - has not grabbed a larger audience and whether it will return again.
With all the hype of the "Nuts" campaign that saw angered fans rain 20 tons (not a typo) of peanuts on CBS executives, an endless deluge of emails and letters sent (and by some fans, fedex) to CBS offices and even over $20,000 raised and donated towards relief efforts in the tornado decimated town of Greensburg, Kansas, what so many potential viewers lost sight on was the excellence behind the series.
Jericho is a drama about a town in Kansas following a series of nuclear bombs going off in the United States. While the initial storyline revolves around the who did, where, why, and how of the attacks from the point of view of a town that was now closed off from all outside communication and power, the series grew into much, much greater. Despite the initial premise of the show, this was hardly a rehashing of "Mad Max" or "The Day After", something that I believe many viewers assumed and turned away from, assuming it may have been sci-fi flavor of the month.
Jericho may have had its roots in a sci-fi concept, but it was anything but fantasy. It was more realistic than most. Jericho became a show about the importance and power of your loved ones and family standing together, one about the defense of your home, and one about the paranoia that lurks right outside in the dark, past the unknown.
It was a series that focused on themes much more personal at heart. It dealt with the changing of one's life forever with one singular moment and finding yourself in a different place. Some characters rose up to become heroes, others found themselves beginning to be corrupted by the new sense of power they now held in their hands due to circumstances beyond their control and all of them, good and bad, still tried to move on and live their day to day lives, the same way we all do when faced with a tragedy. Life has to go on, so you somehow gut through it.
The town of Jericho was no different. When the first season of Jericho ended, the theme of the series turned to war. While Jericho may have been able to hold their town together, a neighboring town wasn't able to do so, seeing their only choice for survival as an invasion and takeover of Jericho. As Jericho fought for its survival, suddenly the government that had abandoned them in the chaos following the attack appeared, with all their military might, and restored order.
Except it wasn't the United States of America in charge anymore.
The seven episode second season of Jericho, spurred on by the infamous "nuts" campaign, saw some minor changes to the series. Storylines were tightening up, some cast members were relegated to cameos and others were written off. Good or bad, it forced a new focus on the central characters of the series without insulting the audience. No matter what form the series had taken from this point on, Jericho had lived where so many series had died. That in itself was a victory.
A second victory was found in the newfound praise the second series received in the wake of the "nuts" campaign. With a second season built around Jericho's natives trying to undermine a military force they cannot match in numbers or might to preserve the home they love, themes of family vs. corporation, military orders vs. morals, and the American freedoms that we all overlook at some time or another being taken away, Jericho had a new ally in the TV media.
Indeed, Jericho had found critical acclaim. It is seemingly impossible to find a negative review about the second season of Jericho from any major media outlet. The media saw Jericho, correctly or not, as an analogy to the Iraq conflict. They saw military thugs Ravenwood as CBS' answer to Blackwood, although Ravenwood had been scripted many months before Blackwood came to light among the American public. They saw the fractured United States, broken into three separate countries in the wake of the nuclear blasts that opened Jericho's pilot, as a nod to the morally fractured state of the world today.
The mainstream media suddenly realized what Jericho fans had known all along - that there was something special here. Something that told a story that needed to be told, a reminder not to take what we have for granted and most of all, something that was what great television should be - entertaining and thought provoking at the same time.
The ratings for the series, sadly, have not followed suit with the passion of the audience and the praise from the media. It's mind-boggling and one can only wonder if Jericho will end up sacrificed to a Nielsen ratings system that have grown weary and outdated in today's age of digital cable, online viewing, bit torrent sites and DVRs. If so, it would be a true tragedy.
That leaves us with the end of the second season of Jericho.
With one episode left, Jericho fans are going to tune in to see whether the town they have come to consider as their own will survive the military naming it an insurgency.
They will tune in to see whether two of the heroes of the show, Jake and Hawkins, can finally bring down the conspiracy that set off 23 nuclear blasts and decimated the country in the series' first episode, preventing a rogue nuclear weapon from being set off in the process.
They will tune in to see whether everyman Stanley Richmond can morally come to terms with the fact he killed Goetz, the government-endorsed mercenary who murdered his beloved sister Bonnie (the Crispus Attucks of Jericho) and try to rebuild his life, even in the face of now being one of the most hunted men in town by the military.
They will tune in to see whether Major Beck, the officer morally conflicted with the orders he is being given to police and oversee Jericho, will break rank to do "the right thing" even if that means military suicide.
They will tune in to see whether the corrupt Jennings & Rall can finally be brought down and they will tune in, hoping against hope, that it won't be the last time they hear a Morse code signal playing as Jericho opens an episode.
I will certainly be among them. Something this good doesn't come along often and something this good deserves something better than being tossed aside to the TV graveyard. I'll be watching, but whether I am counted as an actual viewer or not, I couldn't tell you, since I don't have a Nielsen box sitting in my house.
Is there hope? Honestly, there's probably very little, but as Jericho has shown its viewers over the last 28 episodes, as long as there's hope...there's a future. It's up to the audience to embrace it.
Mike Johnson can be reached at Mike@PWInsider.com.
For more on Jericho, visit http://www.cbs.com/primetime/jericho.
