By Jon Lachonis | A ton of tension surrounded the premiere of Jericho’s second season. Summarily cancelled last year, and famously rescued by a successful fan campaign, the post apocalyptic drama needs to make a strong showing in order to win a full season order from CBS next year. Figuring out whether the premiere was a success is not an exact science. |
On one hand, Jericho’s 7.1million viewers is inline with its season finale numbers, save for one detail: Jericho aired an hour earlier last season. In that light, it probably scored slightly higher in the adult demo, mostly because of the later time slight, and picks up a proportional edge to boot. Confused? Me too.
Ratings aside, the return seems to have earned almost universal praise from critics and fans alike. The story has changed significantly; no longer is Jericho an allegorical dissection of the American dream set against the symbolic backdrop of the American nightmare. Now we have a story with some genuine high concept sinew: global conspiracies, strange plagues, ominous overlords, conflicted heroes. This is Jericho pushed through the lens of more successful serial concepts like Lost, Battlestar Galactica, and Prison Break, yet coming out its own highly engaging self.
Sure, some in the press are mourning the loss of Jericho’s subtle parable like story telling and self contained arcs, but that Jericho got cancelled. Remember? The big challenge for the show, and its grass roots army, is convincing the drop outs to come back and the uninitiated to drop in.
One of the most striking features of Jericho’s reintroduction is the absolute irrelevancy of a first season viewing. If you stopped watching because of the slow pace, odds are you can pick it back up without so much as an evening of recap viewing. The Newbern war, which was the major build up of season one, is dealt with in the first five minutes and filed away with little impact on the story that follows.
The new Jericho story still has much of the subtext of season one, but much more grit. The military moves into Jericho, under the command of the ambiguous Major Beck, and begins reconstruction efforts. A nationalization process is beginning with the strange new government being revealed as but one faction perhaps preparing war with another. The ‘inside job’ aspect of the bombings is now academic, with Hawkings meeting up and contacting other operatives with a clear plan to bring the conspiracy to an end. Jake and the other Rangers are having a nearly post traumatic struggle with life under renewed order, their guerilla hearts still beating hard against the walls of a world coming together too fast.
Whether Jericho fizzles back out due to incredulous audiences refusal to give the new plot a try, or if the series pulls off what seems to be the impossible and builds an audience sizable enough to warrant a full season renewal, it certainly can be said that the Jericho crew took CBS’s cancellation and subsequent revival as a mandate to deliver something worthy of a second chance. Jericho 2.0 is definitely worth a second glance.
