The battle of Jericho

Let me tell you about television shows with cult status! I know a thing or two about them, and about being on the fan side of it. There are people in this world who, hearing me utter the words "The Monkees" sends them running as fast as their feet will carry them. At least that was the reaction at one time. I had it pretty bad. If I ever get around to posting the pictures you will all have a good laugh at me.

The Monkees is about as cult as a TV show gets.

Recently however, I came across a little show called Jericho, a CBS production. Glenn and I became fans after the first episode and the more we watched the more hooked we became. We got through the first season, 22 episodes, in under a week. As of this writing we have also watched the first episode of the second season.


There aren't many TV shows I've watched that I rave about as much as this one. This one is truly a keeper. Even if CBS never gets past the mere 29 episodes they did produce, the show has accomplished much on many levels. For entertainment value it is second to none. The acting, the writing, directing, cinematography ... all of it fantastic! The storyline, while not unique (post-apocalyptic America), still gets unique treatment in the hands of this particular cast and crew. I'm not the biggest fan of the post-apocalyptic storyline simply because it usually winds up being too "out there", too hard for me to believe. But Jericho does for the post-apocalypse what Stargate SG-1 did for sci-fi space shows: makes it hit very close to home, and in doing so they hit a grand slam.

I was just reading about the incident where fans of Jericho rallied against the show's cancellation by sending thousands of pounds of nuts to the CBS executive offices in NY. The nuts was a direct reference to a pivotal line from Jericho's final episode, "Why We Fight" (which I won't give away here, just go watch the show). Well tonight I decided to see if I could find any articles on the incident and found a lot more than I expected, not the least of which being a YouTube video of "wave 3" of the shipments of nuts! It's not a very good video, but I can tell you I was not expecting to find something like that regarding this phenomenon.

Even nuttier (sorry, I couldn't resist!) was the website Nuts Online who I'm guessing was the company where all the nuts came from. They have a page dedicated to the show Jericho and there you can see the original letter sent from CBS to the company wherein they fly the white flag so to speak, acknowledging how impressed they were by the fans' effort to save the show.

So I'm sitting here poring through all this information and now I'm wondering if there is any hope the show will see the light of day again, as there is (or was at one time) a push to get Jericho back in production.

I sincerely hope the effort is successful. It's a great show.