I’ve always enjoyed seeing how society reacts to an apocalyptic event so when I heard about Jericho, I figured there was a pretty good chance I would like it, so I watched the debut episode tonight.
Tonight’s episode was pretty much focused on the whole something happened which caused (at least two) large explosions, so we didn’t really get a whole lot in the way of character development. Apart from the lead, Skeet Ulrich’s character, it would be difficult to write more than one or two sentences about any of the (many) characters we have been introduced to so far. Presumably that will start changing next week as the show moves more into the aftermath stage of the disaster.
I think they would have been better served waiting till later in the episode to have the initial explosion happen. It would have been more meaningful for this episode, and the series in general, if we could have seen more of how people were before they were tossed into their current situation. I can understand, with the importance of getting a good rating for the first few weeks, why they wanted to have something happen fairly early in the episode, but had they waited it would have meant more to see certain characters raising up (or falling apart) when faced with the challenges of living in a post-apocalyptic world.
The whole thing with the prison bus also seemed utterly contrived. Apparently seeing a nuclear explosion has a tendency to crash buses. Ignoring the implausibility of the dual crashes, it seems highly unlikely that the prisoners, once they had gotten free, would wait around for hours and hours so as to ambush anyone who might investigate.
I’m also not looking forward to the prospect of the town being menaced by this random group of prisoners. There are far more interesting issues to explore with the townsfolk themselves; there’s no need to have them battling escaped convicts.
In spite of these issues, I think the show definitely has promise. Whether that promise will be enough to keep the show around until it can develop into something really worthwhile is hard to say though.
