Do you think that Jericho can ...
Question: Do you think that
Jericho can be saved? I hear there is a large outcry of disbelief and a growing campaign to save the show. If CBS doesn't bring it back, could it go to another network?
Answer: As I noted earlier,
Jericho is not the sort of show to be picked up by another network. It was produced by Paramount, which is part of the same corporation as CBS, so they're both buyer and producer, and there's really nowhere else for it to go. (The CW? Hardly.) Can it be saved? Despite the impressive outcry, doubtful. As Michael Ausiello has
reported, CBS has made some noise about providing closure for fans, so let's see where that goes. If it were up to me, I'd commission a TV-movie finale, something like
Jericho: Aftermath, built around a memorial tribute to fallen town hero Johnston Green (
Gerald McRaney) at which point we'd learn what happened to the rest of the characters the fans cared about.
A final note on Jericho for now, to demonstrate the range of mail I've gotten on the subject:
From Calvin: "I imagine many of the angry e-mails you are getting on Jericho (as mentioned in your Dispatch) have chosen to blame the show's hiatus for its demise. I'd like to put forxultth another theory. Maybe the show was just too depressing, and people who were already planning to leave just saw the break as a convenient cutoff point. As cheesy as the mayor's speech was in the pilot, it was pretty much the last bit of optimism we'd see all season. If Lost is "live together, die alone," Jericho was "just die already, because everyone's a bad guy anyway." There was just never any good news. Every interaction with the outside world was a bad one, every piece of news was awful, and you couldn't step two feet out of that town without running into vicious looters. Not that the town itself was much better. The bad guy won the election, the innocent kids turned into heartless opportunists, and the pregnant woman died (as did her baby). I get the apocalypse motif, but shouldn't there be a few good moments amid the horror? Can I get just a little "triumph of the human spirit" here? By the end, Gerald McRaney's character was really the only reason left to watch, and now he's dead (more bad news, what were the odds?). So for me, I say good riddance."
It's true that before the cancellation was official, I was fielding angry mail from viewers who'd pledged never to watch again after McRaney was killed off. Moot point now. The bottom line on
Jericho: It was a risky project, to be sure, especially for a network like CBS that until lately had rarely strayed into this sort of buzz-generating serial, and look what it got them. I imagine they're rocked by the reaction to this cancellation, the loudest they've experienced since dropping
Joan of Arcadia, and this response seems much more ferocious. The downbeat nature of the show was, I'm sure, a turnoff for many. Others, however, found the survival-against-the-odds angle inspiring. I thought the show improved as it went on, especially once it moved beyond Super Jake heroics, and I'm frankly surprised that CBS, which is in the market for shows that stimulate a bit more fan buzz than the garden-variety procedural tends to do, didn't try to nurture the show at least into a second season. The network is paying for its short-sightedness right now. (For those who are somehow out of the loop, the link I get most frequently from protesters is jericholives.com. Beyond that, I'm staying out of it.)
