Jericho Exec Balances Good and Bad News
Skeet Ulrich, Jericho
The new CBS drama
Jericho has a good-news/bad-news message. The good news is that you can survive a nuclear attack. The bad news is it’s not a lot of fun afterwards. But the whole “what if” nature of
Jericho — set in a small town that is cut off from the rest of the world after a nuclear strike — is what makes it one of the more intriguing concepts of the new season. The Biz talked to executive producer Jon Turteltaub about why he thinks it’s the right time to go nuclear in prime time.
TVGuide.com: A lot of people are going to compare this show to the 1983 TV-movie The Day After, which was also about how a nuclear attack affects a Kansas town.
Jon Turteltaub: The main difference is we’re not doing a show about people walking around with their hair falling out. It’s about what you do when you survive it. It could be any place that gets cut off. What’s odd about our show [is that] it’s not about the place where the disaster happened. It’s about the place affected by the place. If you think about 9/11 — if you lived in New Jersey, [what happened in New York still] had a powerful impact on your life.
TVGuide.com: The nuclear attacks in the first episode aren’t illusory in any way?
Turteltaub: This is an actual event. What we are dealing with is... the lack of information the audience has is directly compared to the lack of information the people in the show have. The show never leaves the town of Jericho. We know what they know. They will learn a lot as it goes, and they are desperate to learn. It is an underestimated and powerful [need] to know stuff. We are in an information age. If my cable went out in my house, I couldn’t eat a meal. We are so geared up to know stuff. It gives us this powerful need to know. The audience has that same thing watching the show. They’ve got to know what happened, what’s going to happen next, what’s going on with Skeet Ulrich’s character. And as we go, the character will take on more importance.
TVGuide.com: How did you research this show?
Turteltaub: We spent a lot of time talking to the head of the Centers for Disease Control. And we did a lot of research on the physics and the meteorology of what happens in a nuclear explosion. The thing that surprised me and was hard to wrap my head around, and this always sounds bad when you say it, [is that the explosions] are not as bad as we're being told they are. Our notion of a nuclear bomb lands on the Golden Gate Bridge and all of San Francisco is destroyed; that's really not true. Chinatown would probably be fine. It's much more contained then you would think — there is no nuclear winter caused by one nuclear bomb. Nuclear winter is caused by tons of nuclear bombs. The danger after the immediate blast is in that radiation cloud. But that radiation only affects the place that radiation goes to. Which is why the show will involve multiple bombs. There is so much misinformation and fear and panic about these things, it’s to our advantage to sometimes use that in creating drama. At the same time we want to sort of clarify some of the truths. Our nuclear-bomb expert begged us to let people know that everybody doesn’t get radiation sickness. Our fear is sometimes our biggest enemy.
TVGuide.com: And the show is going to be about those fears?
Turteltaub: It has to be. Although tonally I don’t know how much of that comes off.... The show is not gloom and doom/everybody gets boils on their skin and dies. It’s far more about how people cope when the world completely changes.
TVGuide.com: Was it tough to sell a show that deals with such a difficult subject?
Turteltaub: It was a tough sell everywhere but CBS. We pitched it all over. We got [rejections] everywhere, until we got to CBS. They said, "We love it. We get it. Just don’t let it descend into that horrible mess of the whole world is horrible; everybody is sick and poor and dead." Which we never intended to do anyway. And with every step, we’ve kind of been in sync with them. They get it, and I think it’s because it has that piece that connects with the thing we are all afraid of... a nuclear bomb or whatever that outside monster is that’s coming to get us. They also get that Jericho is the town you want to live in. It’s sort of the heart of the American personality and how we cope. If America gets that and feels that about the show, then we’re going to do great. If all they are thinking is that it’s a show about people’s skin being burned off, no one is going to tune in.
TVGuide.com: You grew up in the TV business: Your father, Saul Turteltaub, was the producer of classic shows such as Sanford and Son.
Turteltaub: It’s been fun talking to him about dealing with all of this and what to expect. I grew up around it and grew up feeling safe in it. I would visit my dad’s sets. I was 12 years old and I was listening to Redd Foxx tell dirty jokes backstage and it was the greatest thing I could possibly imagine. It helped take away my fear of going into this.
TVGuide.com: What was your father’s best advice?
Turteltaub: My dad has gone through all the successes and all the failures you need to go through [to learn] to not get your hopes too high and to be patient. The one thing he really pounded into me is to be nice to people.
