Jericho

I’m not very picky when it comes to tv series. There are a lot of series that I’ve kept watching even though friends stopped because they found them boring or lacking a decent story etc. This doesn’t mean I don’t recognize a gem when I see one. Jericho was one of these gems.

I’ll try to avoid major spoilers (minors might slip, but won’t be too bad). The story is set in a small town in present day America. Jake comes back to his home town after being away for 5 years earning his bread with all kinds of fishy transport jobs in Iraq and other dangerous places.
Driving home he sees a bright flash on the horizon…

It turns out that it was the explosion of an atomic bomb, and it wasn’t the only one. A number of bombs have gone off all around the US. Nobody knows who attacked the US, the Russians, China, Korea? The country falls to chaos. Cities get cut off from the outside world, there are thousands of people fleeing their homes suffering from radiation sickness, hunger and whatever. In the meanwhile around 7 different military groups struggle for power over the US, paramilitary groups try to take over local power, and cities clash for recources. No one is safe. A secret agent stationed in Jericho tries to find out who set off the bombs. The deeper he digs the more he finds out about who really was behind the attacks and why.

As always there were people who thought Jericho was crap. Some of these people even got plain angry about Jericho because they said ‘this will néver happen in America, we’ll never turn to chaos like this and the government is prepared well enough to prevent anything like this’. First
off they should realise it’s a tv series, which means in this case complete fiction. They try to tell a fictive story, why get angry about something like this which never happened and probably *hides* never will. That doesn’t mean to say it’s not interesting discussing what ifs. Second, seeing how ‘well’ far lesser disasters (comparitively to a bunch of exploding atomic bombs!!!) have been managed the last couple of years, say the Katrina hurricane for instance, proves that chaos isn’t that hard to imagine. Chaos on a national schale in a country as big as the US however might be hard to imagine, let alone in the circumstances from Jericho, but I think they portrayed a very real and grim and in some ways believable story.

The first season ended in a major cliffhanger when the news broke that Jericho was cancelled. Public (well..people on the internet) outrage enveloped. A group of people set up an action where they send loads and loads of bags of nuts to the makers of Jericho referring to the British 2nd World War reply to the Germans if they would be so kind to surrender: ‘Nuts!’. CBS bought 7 episodes from a second season but decided they didn’t get as many viewers as they wanted.

There are some people who say Jericho had been cancelled because it portrayed the US in a way that would make it look weak in a (real life) period where the US needs/needed every support it can/could get.

There were 2 separate endings which in my eyes were both fortunately satisfactory, one ended the show, the other left a good opening for more episodes. The thing is, I liked how they wrapped it up, but there could’ve been another 1,5 season of Jericho goodyness at least!
So in the end it doesn’t matter whoever or whatever decided that Jericho would be cancelled, the fact is the cancellation sucked!

If you haven’t watched Jericho yet, go go go and watch it asap!