Ellen Gray: 'Jericho' still faces battle for survival

JERICHO. 10 tonight, Channel 3.

TV WRITERS may be going back to work, but it likely will be weeks, and in many cases, months, before the fruits of their labors show up in our living rooms again.

So the timing's probably as good as it's going to get for CBS' embattled "Jericho," which returns tonight for the first of the seven episodes the network ordered last June after first canceling the series.

The change of heart came after fans had tons of peanuts delivered to the network, a campaign born of the word spoken by Skeet Ulrich's character, Jake Green, when the next Kansas town over called for Jericho's surrender: "Nuts."

It's not clear how many of the nut-shippers knew that "Jericho's" writers had taken that reply from Gen. Anthony McAuliffe, responding to a similar invitation at the Battle of the Bulge.

It's even less clear how many realized that peanuts aren't actually nuts, but legumes.

What they did know, however, was that CBS had made "Jericho" and its fans pay for a scheduling mistake. After shaping up to be a moderate hit when it premiered in the fall of 2006, the show was taken off the air for months, only to return with far fewer viewers.

It's the kind of situation that a lot of scripted series will be facing this season, as the fallout from a bitter three-month strike continues. Viewing habits, already shifting rapidly thanks to digital video recorders, DVDs and other entertainment options, may have changed forever.

Some shows aren't going to make it.

Whether "Jericho" is one of them depends on expanding its fan base behind the true believers, whose passion hasn't always been matched by their numbers.

It's not easy to get people to climb aboard a moving train, and "Jericho," a highly serialized show about a tight-knit Kansas town's response to the simultaneous nuclear destruction of major U.S. cities across the country, might seem to be traveling very fast indeed.

Or not.

Most of what a new viewer absolutely needs to know is included in a quick recap at the top of tonight's show, which finds the U.S. military, representing a new federal government based in Cheyenne, Wyo., acting like an army of occupation in Jericho. The rest is easy to pick up.

I've never cared as much about the world beyond "Jericho" as I probably should - considering Philadelphia seems to have been one of the cities taken out - and I thought the best stories last season were the small ones about how people in crisis behave when the world falls apart.

This season, some of the best stories may turn out to be about those same people rebuilding that world. But it can't be done in a vacuum, and so there's a certain amount of politics to be endured, a conspiracy that grows ever more complicated, and a new flag, its red-and-white stripes running vertically rather than horizontally, that's as difficult to look at as last season's most arresting image, a mushroom cloud rising in the west over what used to be Denver.

And though there's progress in one of TV's sweetest romances, the new season continues "Jericho's" much larger romance with the ideas that shaped this country, ideas that not everyone shares.

All politics being local, the wider world's effects on the town of Jericho are bound to have ramifications for characters I've come to care about.

From the three episodes I've seen, I'd say that even after all this time, "Jericho" still has something to say. *

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