Why You Should Watch Jericho on CBS

The town of Jericho, Colorado has its problems. The tax levies apparently never passed so the underground fallout shelter is too badly in repair to shelter the town people. The subliminal message being paying taxes is a good thing. Particularly if some nuclear device is detonated near your town. So, other shelter arrangements are made. Some dynamite is exploded and everybody else seems to be huddled away in a house, the basement and the like waiting out the nuclear rain blast. The town which may or maybe not the last living place on the earth. A couple of troopers outside of town on the ranch are holding hostage Emily and Bonnie. There are also a couple of other people locked in the trunk of the trooper car. The two poseur troopers have guns and short attention spans. After making a break for it, Emily and Bonnie are nearly killed, but Jake comes to the rescue.

Back in town a relatively normal black family is huddled in a dark room that appears to be in the basement. The couple exchange some mundane words and they tell the young son to go fetch his sister who is sitting in her room upstairs. Cut to another scene another character has a map of the US and a box of red push pins. He proceeds to put push pins in and around Denver. Then a red push pin for a suburb of Chicago. Another in the area of Philadelphia. He then proceeds to grab a handful of red push pins and begins sticking them in a slew of places. All we hear is metal hitting paper. This must be some hint or foretelling of future episodes. Could it be we have another mystic median on our hands.

The story also includes young love. A cute young pair are huddled down in a nice suburban ranchette home while her parents are away. She initially, told him to go away because her parents would be coming home and to stay off her property. He had come with warnings about the nuclear rains and a bag of goodies. He asked her to come with him back to town. She refuses, he gives her the bag of goodies and starts to leave and she calls him back. Apparently, the can of pop pulled at her heart strings and she asked him to stay with her. So, they remain at the house with barred up windows. Hoping that the nuclear rains and winds carrying fallout just blow by.

Of note, it seems the cinematographers or directors have elected to use some method of lighting and film filtering similar to the show Deadwood. It gives the appearance of historical aging to the final film product. Maybe in this instance it is meant to be some kind of mental image of pending death and not aging, just end timeseque. The characters are now. The rural town may have not seen much action for the past 50 years, except some kind of mining activity which Jake blew up. It also appears that some town people were secreted down into a mine shaft for their own protection. Jake blowing up some of the equipment on the surface does not explain how this was going to help the people underground. It also does not explain how the possible rumbling on the surface may have caused some seismic activity underground. It is just done and then Jake is off in his truck going over the dusty prairie of southeastern Colorado to save Emily and Bonnie from the bad guy poser sheriffs.

All in all the series may be doomed if the town of Jericho does not move on. The problem is where to go. In the next episode it appears at least some believe the best plan is to venture out to see if any one else is alive in North America. Whether they use the red push pen Oujie board map looks probable, but not certain. The other problem is if this was a nuclear blast, how certain can everybody be that there is not contaminated death waiting on every corner. For some reason, Jericho was spared. Perhaps, the reason is some twist on the Bible or some other twist at this time unknown to the reviewer. The plot is Survivors in a crummy town with no sandy beaches, no palm trees, and no ocean. It is kind of like a Survivor episode filmed solely in Death Valley. Maybe, some scouts venture out. Maybe they see the Sears Towers in a huddled mass or the Liberty Bell with a horizontal crack laying on its side.

The viewer will just have to wait and see if this shapes up as another Survivor, Lost survival show. Apparently if one formula works in an island setting the producers think the desolate area of Jericho will work also. We will just have to wait.