Lennie James by Monty Brinton/CBS
Have Jericho fans seen the last of their show, now that CBS has aired the "alternate" ending/series-ender? Executive producer Carol Barbee, who is currently shopping the drama around to other outlets, shares a peek at the original season finale.TVGuide.com: Will viewers have any burning questions coming out of the alternate ending/series finale?Carol Barbee: Let me see.... I can tell you that in the original ending, Hawkins has to sacrifice himself to let Jake get away with the bomb and get it to Texas so it can be tested and prove that they were telling the truth. Texas would then swing their support to Columbus and defeat Cheyenne.TVGuide.com: Does Hawkins mortally sacrifice himself, or just let himself get captured?Barbee: Well, he gets captured but he's also shot.... He's pretty messed up, and Jake feels like he's leaving him for dead. So we show you where he's taken and you see that the mission for the next season is, "We have to go rescue Hawkins and we have to stop these [bad...
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Skeet Ulrich and Ashley Scott by Michael Desmond/CBS
Might the folks of Jericho have some fight left in them after all? Not long after CBS announced its decision not to renew the drama for a third season (and thus air a series finale Tuesday night), I spoke with executive producer Carol Barbee about the sad news, the show's "amazing" fans, and this week's "emotionally satisfying" conclusion.TVGuide.com: I'm sorry to hear about the show. We were big fans of it here.Carol Barbee: You guys were great. I really appreciate it.TVGuide.com: When did you get word about CBS' decision?Barbee: Friday. I knew that they had an internal meeting on Thursday, to decide which of the endings we were going to show. At that time they gave us permission to speak to the cast, because we had requested to have 24 hours to speak to them, which I did on the phone, before it went out to the general public.TVGuide.com: The response on our news blog was astounding, and I've seen two common refrains from the readers. Some are saying that the fans didn’t fulfi...
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Skeet Ulrich, Richard Speight Jr, Bob Stephenson and Kenneth Mitchell, Jericho
The fate of CBS' Jericho after its second season, tentatively scheduled to launch in January, may still be up in the air. But Carol Barbee has a contingency plan. The executive producer shot an alternate ending in case the Eye decides to cancel the show for a second time.
"The ending that we planned was always meant to be a payoff for the seven-episode arc," Barbee told TV Guide at Wednesday night's Jericho Season 1 DVD release party. "It won't close off the whole story but it will show you where we would go in a third season." If the show isn't renewed, "It gives you a huge mythology so that you understand so much about what has happened," she says.
In the meantime, the next time we see Jericho, the town will, again, be in total chaos. "We leave on the brink of war with New Bern," said Barbee. "The government has broken up into f
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As first scooped by the Ausiello Report, CBS is pondering new life for Jericho, reportedly at mid-season and for eight episodes. But as many have since asked, for only eight episodes? Or, best case, for lots more? "The idea would not be to bring it for eight and out, but... with the hope that it would keep going," executive producer Carol Barbee tells the Los Angeles Times. Hurdles include rounding up the "surviving" cast, as well as solving some "logistical" puzzles. "[The new CBS drama] Swingtown was supposed to take over the same stages," Barbee explains, "so it's a lot about [finding] a schedule that works for all of us."Originally, says the Times, CBS proposed a two-hour "wrap-up" movie, but Barbee "felt like that was doing it short-shrift. It's too big of a story."And the big moral here? "Networks are going to have to look at numbers and who is watching their show and who is downloading their show in a different way from here on out," says Barbee. "They have to understand that...
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Jericho
Someone on Jericho will die this week so that the show may live on. It sounds heartless. But the producers of the CBS drama about life in a small Kansas town after a nuclear catastrophe are sacrificing one of the series' regulars in the battle-fueled finale as part of a long-term plan to take the story in a new direction. Executive producer Carol Barbee will only describe the victim as "somebody who had a deal to be here for the next five years." Is it bad boy turned local hero Jake Green (Skeet Ulrich)
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Skeet Ulrich and Ashley Scott, Jericho
What do the Morse-code messages say? Is Hawkins a hero or a villain? As the Feb. 21 return of CBS' Jericho nears, TV Guide has the inside scoop on these bombshells — and more!
Are we ever going to get outside of Jericho and really see what happened?You'll get a lot of answers in the first new episode of the year (airing next Wednesday), which shows events that happened 36 hours before the bombs were dropped — if they were actually "dropped." But in the future, the show will only follow peripatetic lead character Jake Green (Skeet Ulrich) and other Jericho residents. "We're trying to tell the story from the point of view of the people in this town," says executive producer Jon Turteltaub. "So we're not g
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