Jericho
A small town in Kansas is thrown into turmoil by the appearance of a mushroom cloud on the horizon.
Bill over at DisContent gets it right when he says that Jericho is “a bit soft in the belly”. Jericho is a show that has a number of great moments, many of which tap into those Cold War memories people of a certain age share, that unfortunately lacks the overall level of suspense that this kind of program requires to succeed.
I remember watching a stand-up comedian performing a routine about the original Kansas-based nuclear apocalypse thriller, The Day After. He pointed out a scene in which people are rioting at a grocery store and you can see cashiers working hard keeping everything in order. His question was, what kind of overtime do you get during the apocalypse? A similar sense of ignorant calm pervades Jericho. You actually see waitresses working at the local tavern mere hours after a mushroom cloud appears on the horizon. Only a few townspeople seem to have any idea of the gravity of their situation.
One of the fallacies of the many dark suspense serials that came out on the heels of Lost was in taking things at a snail’s pace and only slowly giving out answers to the questions being posed. The reality is that most successful serials actually answer those questions both early and regularly. What they do is replace said mysteries with new ones. They keep the pump primed. It may be too early to say, but the first episode of Jericho seems more like that of the disasterous Invasion than of the show which it no doubt wants to emulate.
Whatever little sense of panic created in the premiere is quelled quite easily by the good folk of Jericho, meant perhaps to emphasize the level-headed rationality of some fantasy version of small-town America. Practically the only reason to watch a show like this is to place familiar characters into an unfamiliar situation and see how they react under the pressure, something which Jericho so far hasn’t come close to establishing. The only way that I can see Jericho succeeding in the long run is if it became something of an anti-Lost, in which characters familiar to one another slowly become strangers and where old secrets aren’t necessarily revealed but created and acted upon. In short, the decline of civilization. I’m intrigued enough to keep watching, but not for long.