Show’s fans campaign to keep program on air
TRIUMPH OF THE NUTS: I never thought I’d be writing this, but there’s a very persistent rumour being reported by Michael Ausiello of TV Guide as of yesterday afternoon that CBS is considering renewing Jericho, despite canceling the show last month. While there was no mention of the very creative campaign being waged by Jericho fans to pressure the network – a well-coordinated effort that involved letters, e-mails, and 38,994 lbs. of nuts delivered to CBS offices in New York and Los Angeles, with a reported 10,000 lbs. delivered in one day alone.
The nuts are an in-joke of sorts – a line delivered by a character on the final episode of the show – and there was no reason to believe that they’d succeed any more than the Ferris Wheel that Everwood fans erected outside the CW offices around this time last year. Still, Ausiello reports that CBS is considering bringing back Jericho as a midseason replacement for eight episodes.
“My spies caution that this is in no way official,” he wrote yesterday, “but it certainly sounds like it could be by day’s end. It’s now just a matter of signing the actors to new deals and, according to one insider, finding a new soundstage to house the show’s sets.”
I could end up eating these words like a handful of cashews by the time you read this (mmm … cashews), but if it’s true, it suggests that the relationship between networks and viewers has finally matured beyond the parental model, with viewers’ protests being generally met with gruff retorts that you’ll eat what’s put in front of you, and who do you think is paying the rent around here, anyway. Well, viewers have finally figured out that they’re the ones paying the rent, in very real economic terms, and they can always stop paying, if it comes to that. Either that, or the networks have gotten a glimpse of the future, when audience response can be measured in far more concrete terms than Nielsen families and their ratings, and delivery of content won’t rely on prime time blocks and the venerable status of aging networks and their lumbering executive decisions.
Either that, or they were just sick of the nuts, and the PR department told them they had been neatly outflanked. Now it’s up to Jericho fans to actually tune in to the revived series, should it reappear on the schedule, because there’s nothing a network executive loves more than being right after all.
TONGUE IN CHEQUE: Gene Simmons Family Jewels, my favorite sitcom-masquerading-as-a-reality-show, has been renewed for a third season by A&E. NBC will be airing the U.S. Open on all seven of its cable offspring – including Bravo and Sci-Fi. A man in a Donald Trump mask robbed a bank in Great Falls, Virginia. It looks like everybody probably is going to die by the time the Sopranos is over.
