Article by Matt Roush.

Source: TV Guide February 11-17, 2008.

With Jericho, it's always about survival, and the show's own tale of resurrection is at least as dramatic as what happens on screen. (See page 40.)

After fans rallied to save its form cancellation last year, CBS relented. The result: a seven-episode mini-season in which Jericho evolves from a postapocalyptic allegory into a deadly earnest conspiracy thriller doubling as a Revolutionary War parable.

"At what point is this a country we don't even recognize?" says one of the good citizens of Jericho, Kansas. For good reason. With Washington, D.C, and 22 other cities wiped out in coordinated nuclear bomb strikes and the federal government in tatters, Jericho imagines a divided nation with rival capitals in Cheyenne, Wyoming, and Columbus, Ohio. Propping up the Cheyenne government: a sinister corporation with private "contractors" who control access to money and necessary supplies. They appear to be about as trustworthy as the rescuers on Lost.

An insurgency of ordinary townsfolk emerges, led by newly christened sheriff Jake (Skeet Ulrich in a state of perpetual glower). "Every revolution that's ever been fought . . . started in rooms like this," another ringleader says, invoking the Stamp Act and the Boston Tea Party.

The action is fast-paced, the plotting dense, if often simplistic, and the tension generally sustained, as long as you don't overthink the improbabilities of the cover-up over who's responsible for the bomb attacks. Condensing a season into seven episodes thankfully leaves little room for padding--or, sadly, for anything beyond the most shallow character development.

Jericho is more a victory for fans than a triumph of the imagination.

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