SuperSatellite

Nuts!

// December 4th, 2007 // Entertainment, Television

Well, my day was made today. There were many of us disappointed when Jericho met an untimely demise after CBS decided not to renew it for a second season back early this summer. This following a season where several shows thought it’d be a good idea to go on a several week hiatus in the spring before coming back with new episodes. All the shoes suffered ratings drops from it, and Jericho was one that got the axe for it, sacrificed to unholy TV production gods. What made it doubly bad was that the series ended on a cliff hanger not matched since the days of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It was brutal to kill a show after that and leave us wondering where it went from there.

Then came the support. The internet turned out to be the proving grounds for a mass fan support campaign that resulted in something like 20 tons of nuts getting sent to CBS headquarters, if I remember my facts right. More than 40,000 pounds of nuts worked to change their mind, and CBS ordered a short run to follow in 2008. It’s not often this kind of thing works, but here it did, and we were ecstatic. And then we waited…

And waited…Every once in a while news would come out about the filming. Cast and crew were excited to be back, etc, etc. After a while, the filming of new episodes was done, and then there was nothing more to be heard. I was certainly beginning to get frustrated that apparently CBS was going to sit on this good show indefinitely, even in the face of the Writer’s Strike, which meant that if they got off their rump and gave it a slot, it could be one new show in a sea of crappy reality television. Well, today I got what I needed. I found out that CBS has slated Jericho to return Tuesday, January 12th at 9:00PM central time.

This is great, because it’s a low risk gamble. Sure, the WGA strike might be over by then, but the odds of new shows hitting the air by then is pretty low. That means Jericho will be one drama putting out new episodes each week, competing with worthless trash reality television. That gives it a good chance of bringing in good viewership. And even if it doesn’t, we get our short run, and we get some closure, as opposed to how it ended at the conclusion of season one. So yay!

This makes me think back to Firefly. Fox killed that off for some kind of illogical spite I think. Even if you wanted to watch it, you couldn’t, because they shifted the time slot around so much. But, Fox is notorious for that, and we all know it (anyone else get a kick out of how Bender’s Big Score started out?). Now it has a huge following. The Sci-Fi Channel has rebroadcast rights, as far as I know. This is my official announcement that they are idiots for not buying out the full rights, and putting it back into production. It would have been right at home there, and gotten the attention it deserves. The odds of that happening now are slim to none, with most everyone else off on other projects here and there. Such a waste…

Fingers crossed for Dollhouse though.