With Jericho, it's always about survival, and the show's own tale of resurrection is at least as dramatic as what  happens on screen.

After fans rallied to save it from cancellation last year, CBS relented. The result: a seven-episode mini-season in which Jericho evolves from a postapocalyptic allegory into a deadly earnest conspiracy thriller doubling as a Revolutionary War parable.

"At what point is this a country we don't even recognize?" says one of the good citizens of Jericho, Kansas. For good reason. With Washington, D.C., and 22 other cities wiped out in coordinated nuclear-bomb strikes and the federal government in tatters, Jericho imagines a divided nation with rival capitals in Cheyenne, Wyoming, and Columbus, Ohio. Propping up the Cheyenne government is a sinister corporation with private "contractors" who control access to money and necessary supplies. They appear to be about as trustworthy as the rescuers on Lost.

An insurgency of ordinary townsfolk emerges, led by newly christened sheriff Jake (Skeet Ulrich in a state of perpetual glower). "Every revolution that's ever been fought…started in rooms like this," another ringleader says, invoking the Stamp Act and the Boston Tea Party.

The action is fast-paced, the plotting dense, if often simplistic, and the tension generally sustained, as long as you don't overthink the improbabilities of the cover-up over who's responsible for the bomb attacks. Condensing a season into seven episodes thankfully leaves little room for padding — or, sadly, for anything beyond the most shallow character development. Jericho is more a victory for fans than a triumph of the imagination.

Jericho airs Tuesdays at 10 pm/ET on CBS.

Sidebar: Lipstick Jungle

Question of the moment: Which Sex and the City knockoff is worse, ABC's Cashmere Mafia or NBC's Lipstick Jungle (based on Sex author Candace Bushnell's best-seller)? It really depends which one you're watching at the time. Both are simply dreadful, failing miserably at making their glamorously high-powered heroines sympathetic, credible or remotely interesting.

If Jungle has an edge, it's because Kim Raver (24) at least brings some erotic oomph to her clichéd role: an unhappily married magazine editor who succumbs to the temptation of a young stud resembling Ben from Felicity. Her pals are out of bad sitcoms: Brooke Shields as a movie mogul who is accused of being a bad mom, and Lindsay Price as an insecure designer wooed by a billionaire. Just try to care about these people. I dare you.

Personally, I'm holding out for "Mascara Posse." Surely these things, like tragedies, come in threes.

Lipstick Jungle airs Thursdays at 10 pm/ET on NBC.