A FEW WEEKS ago, I really was ready to say goodbye to "Jericho."

Now I'm not so sure.

Not that it matters, since it's already a goner. Even before CBS confirmed Friday that tomorrow's episode would be the series finale, it was hard to imagine anything the show could do in that hour - the last of seven the network ordered for this season after bringing the show back from the dead - that could outweigh the Nielsen ratings.

In the first five weeks since "Jericho's" Feb. 12 return, the drama about the aftermath of a coordinated series of nuclear attacks on the United States averaged 6.8 million viewers. Last week's episode, the one that persuaded me to hang in a bit longer, attracted just 5.73 million, thanks perhaps to a half-hour's overlap with ABC's "Dancing With the Stars."

Last season, "Jericho" averaged 9.5 million, and CBS canceled it, bringing it back only after passionate fans buried the network under tons of peanuts.

I've been wrong before, but I don't see peanuts working twice.

All I'm hoping for from tomorrow's finale is enough of a resolution that those of us who've watched from the beginning won't feel like chumps. Producers reportedly shot two endings, and we'll be seeing the one that, according to the Hollywood Reporter, "is notably different from the cliffhanger version."

Having always loved "Jericho" for its look at how a small town deals with a catastrophe beyond its borders, I'm perhaps less invested than some in the overarching conspiracy that caused that catastrophe in the first place.

But then I watched "The X-Files" for the banter.

So as the writers killed off one intriguing resident after another while importing some positively cartoonish villains from the outside world, "Jericho" began to feel like Fox's "24," more comic book than epic novel.

And the death of Bonnie (Shoshannah Stern), the deaf farm girl whose story seemed hardly to have begun, didn't help.

But as her brother, Stanley (Brad Beyer), struggled last week with what seemed to be genuine remorse at having taken a life, even if it was the life of his sister's killer, "Jericho" once again felt like a story told on a human scale.

It helped, too, that Pamela Reed finally returned to the show and that Jake (Skeet Ulrich), in military custody, hallucinated a conversation with his grandfather that put the struggle against the new government and the company that appears to own it in some kind of historical perspective.

"This has all happened before," we heard the old man tell him. "If the names weren't Jennings & Rall, they would be names like the British East India Trading Co. If it wasn't Ravenwood, it would be the Hessian mercenaries."

"Revolution," breathed Jake, as if it had only just occurred to him what was going on.

Revolution indeed.

Let's just hope it's a fast one.

A message on 'Medium'

I'm not particularly happy with "Wicked Game," a two-parter that begins tonight (10 p.m., Channel 10), with Allison finally discovering something important about Huston's character, private investigator Cynthia Keener.

Keener's felt like an oddity from the first, from her job - with a company called Ameritips that apparently tracks missing people for fun and profit - to her abruptness and her mood swings, and the explanation for the personality quirks turns out to be a little too predictable.

Still, I have to admire the patience of "Medium's" writers, who've shown an uncommon willingness to upset their main characters' lives this season without providing too quick a fix, exploring instead the pressures that unemployment can put on every aspect of family life.

Having both of a family's breadwinners out of regular work at the same time is the kind of nightmare you don't have to be psychic to dream these days, and "Medium" may be one of the few dramas in prime time to face today's economy without flinching.

Contrasted with the psychic plots, which grow more contrived by the week, what's going on with the DuBois family seems, if anything, too real.

This is one family that needs more help than those economic-stimulus checks are going to provide. If Allison could just dream up a solution - one that didn't involve lottery tickets - maybe we could all get some sleep. *

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