Fall TV Preview: Jericho
CBS, a network that has never been particularly fond of serialized drama, is trotting out a few of them this fall (fifty million Lost, Desperate Housewives, and Grey’s Anatomy viewers can’t be wrong!). Jericho is their response to Lost. It’s about a small town in Kansas (the type of small town where kids on a school bus actually sing “Old McDonald”) that seems to survive a national nuclear attack. Now, the towns residents are trapped and have to figure out what they’re going to do. Yeah, it’s a lot like Lost. Except in the ways it should be. For a pilot episode involving nuclear explosions, Jericho is painfully slow, and rarely exciting. By comparison (and in cases like this, comparisons must be made), the Lost pilot was unrelenting (and it happened to be two hours long). Sure, its budget ballooned to well over a hundred-million 10-14 million* dollars, but every cent was on the screen. Jericho seems hesitant on showing the viewer anything– though you do get to see a man give a girl a tracheotomy with a knife and some plastic straws but when DON’T you get to see that? Am I right people?
There are some interesting casting choices. Skeet Ulrich, the poor-man’s Johnny Depp, has the lead as a mysterious loner. His father is the mayor of the town and played by Gerald McRaney, (Major Dad) who was remarkable as George Hearst this past summer in Deadwood. Also, Shoshannah Stern from Weeds is present as one of the locals (and seems to be as lovely here as she was there). Of course, none of this matters when the actors aren’t given anything to work with.
Jericho is a decent premise, but that only gets you so far. Lost had everything going for it: the writing, the cast, the money, and especially the drama. Jericho fails because for a show based on mystery, it couldn’t seem less mysterious.
Jericho begins Wednesday, September 20th, at 8:00pm ET on CBS.
*I’ve had the $100-million tag in my head since the show launched (or at least since I finished reading Desperate Networks, Bill Carters jumbled but fascinating look at the past four years of network television). How could I have been so far off the mark? I went back to Carter’s book and looked for the answer, but all I could find was “$12 million” everywhere I looked. The closest was the $100-million that ABC owed in make-good ads. Either way, MagneticMediaFed regrets the error.
I received the second episode of Jericho earlier in the week, and finally got around to watching it this afternoon (by “finally getting around to watching it” I mean “forcing myself to sit through it, because everything on TV can’t be puppy dogs and ice cream”). Little changed dramatically between the pilot and episode two to make me give this series even the most basic recommendation. The fact of the matter is everything about this show makes you think about Lost, right down to the opening title screen and its slowly appearing logo in the midst of television static, and yet it’s presented as if it were trying to copy 7th Heaven or Picket Fences instead of the one program that it actually should be ripping off. Copying is part of Hollywood. Old School is a hack of Animal House, but it still had enough good jokes to justify its existence. Jericho, for all intents and purposes, has a great premise and should be nothing shy of thrilling and dramatic, but it isn’t. It’s willing to borrow everything from Lost except the elements that would actually make it a watchable series.
Forty-minutes into this second episode we finally get our first tastes of some action. I know it was action because of the metal music playing in the background. Likewise, I knew that when Death Cab For Cutie popped up on the soundtrack at the end, I was suppose to be sad.
At the current pace of the series, I could see things getting interesting around episode nine, but that’s only under the assumption that the creators figure out how to get a reaction from the audience (and if the show makes it that far). Save your time, I say. You aren’t missing anything. Anything.
September 5th, 2006 at 2:31 pm
Where did you get the $100 million pilot number? According to this story (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/08/14/wlost14.xml), it was greenlighted for $12 mil. (and got ABC’s chairman, Lloyd Braun [!] canned), and according to this (http://starbulletin.com/2004/05/17/news/story7.html), the pilot cost between $10-14 million.
Either way, have to agree with your larger point: Jericho was really boring. Creaky Broadcasting System indeed.
September 8th, 2006 at 4:30 pm
[...] 1) I updated my review of Jericho after watching the second episode, but did it change my mind? [...]