Sunday, May 6, 2007

Watching Jericho

I'm not a fan of hour-long TV dramas, mostly because they all seem to be either lawyer shows, cop shows, or doctor shows, and I've seen enough of those to last me a lifetime. And I'm even less a fan of the current rash of "serials"; I've gotten hooked on shows like "Lost" and "Invasion" (and the godfather of all of today's non-soap opera serials, "Twin Peaks") only to wind up bitterly disappointed when it becomes clear that the writers have no idea how to keep the shows fresh and maintain creative integrity--though I do believe that "Invasion" was about to escape that curse when it was cancelled. But I do like the CBS series "Jericho," a serialized drama about what happens in a small Kansas town after nuclear terrorist attacks in several American cities leave our nation's infrastructure in disarray--not enough food, power, medicine, or communication. The show has done a nice job of giving us just enough information about the attacks (Was it China? Radical Islamists? Home-grown terrorists?) and slowly revealing the possibly shady backgrounds of some of the characters. The lead, Skeet Ulrich, doesn't do much for me--he's playing a deadly serious person, the son of a town leader who had been gone from Jericho for years under mysterious circumstances and returned just before the attacks, but he tries too hard to be an unreadable stoic and I keep expecting him to burst out laughing at his most melodramatic moments. However, he's grown on me over the season, as has Alicia Coppola as Mimi, a tax inspector from New York City who was in Jericho to foreclose on the farm of corn fed hunk Stanley (Brad Beyer); in true screwball comedy style, the two began as enemies and have become lovers, and the scene in which Mimi tearfully bid goodbye to Stanley as he went off to a neighboring town to build windmills (for power) actually made me teary, despite the cliched situation and writing--though I am the kind of person who gets teary at Folgers' commercials.

The most interesting character is Hawkins (Lennie James), another man of mystery who arrived in Jericho with his wife and two kids just before the bombs fell. The fact that he's just about the only black man in town made him stand out even more, and the show did a good job of keeping us in the dark about his background--he's supposed to be an ex-cop but we found out quickly that he's FBI, but is he good FBI or rogue FBI? Turns out he's CIA, and was undercover with a band of terrorists, trying to stop the attacks (he was assigned to set off a bomb in Columbus, Ohio, which is where I live!), and he's been playing cat and mouse games with other goodie/baddie agents all season. Gerald McRaney is the ex-mayor, father of Ulrich, and husband of Pamela Reed, and though I've never seen McRaney in much before, I like him here, and I'm sorry to hear that he doesn't want to a second season, and will presumably be killed off next week in the first season finale. There are lots of other situations and relationships which have been developed, my least favorite being the plight of the wimpy high school boy who is learning to be less wimpy as he starts to gain power as owner of the town's only grocery store. But generally, the show has kept me involved and has done a nice job of balancing the larger issues (the bombs, the cold, hunger, unfriendly visitors) with smaller ones (keeping the bar going, getting folks in and out of romantic entanglements). The show has taken a turn toward the action side of things in the last couple episodes, stopping character development dead in its tracks, but it has apparently been renewed for a second season so I have high hopes for the season finale this week. As long as Stanley and Mimi don't get killed off, I'll come back in September for more.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Skeet is a way better actor than this series allows him to be. YOu know the tv execs get involved and say things like, "make him more bad-boyish, etc" Unfortunately, the melodramatic type of acting, like Keifer on 24 is what the networks are looking for. Personally, I hate it, but so many people tune into the other shows, that the networks assume that is what people want. INTENSE. Skeet has an extensive range, yet, due to the seriousness of the subject matter, he can't really let loose and joke around much. If you watch his other series, MIRACLES, you will get a a better sense of his abilities. Sometimes actors suck, and sometimes the directors/writers don't give them a chance to shine. I think Skeet is more in the latter category.

I like the Jericho show, thought there are so many cornball-cheese moments, I can feel my bowels binding up by just watching. There should be a warning at the beginning of the show for the lactose-intolerant. But, it is far more interesting than %90 of the shows on and so I keep watching.

Michael said...

I don't think I've ever seen Skeet in anything else ever, so I'm willing to believe he's a better actor than he seems in Jericho. He is stuck in a kind of one-note character.