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I admit it.  I’m a sucker for disaster movies, shows and books.  Deep Impact is one of my all time favorites.  I’ve wanted to see a good nuke movie since I was a teenager and first saw footage from Bikini Island.  (That would be the island where the U.S. did experiments with nuclear bombs, not Bikini Bottom, home to a popular sponge.) So I was really looking forward to finally getting more time on my calendar to watch Jericho from CBS.  Although, I did find it annoying to have all L.A.-style characters put in a pseudo-Kansas town (filmed in Montana—Come on, people!), I still liked the story line and enjoyed sinking into the DVD set of last season.  I loved Jake and Emily, Stanley and Mimi, and absolutely would join Dale’s section of town. He is the only guy who truly represented the spirit of the Midwest.  I also enjoyed the cinematography and knew that with a little more money from the studios, this director and camera crew could really do wonders – like maybe film in Kansas and put in a few Amish and Native Americans, or bring back a few of the Hispanic people they were able to hire for the pilot.  I really liked the pilot.  Give them more money and let them do their job, Studios!

The second season premiere started off with a bang - literally. We fall into the middle of the war between neighbors Jericho and Newbern. Let me just say that this is totally inaccurate, from a Midwesterner’s point of view. One Midwest town bordering another would *never *go to war against the neighboring town because residents of both municipalities are all related. Seriously, it would likely split along family lines or denominational lines than actual town borders. To keep from getting hung up on this fact, I just pretended in my mind that it wasn’t Jericho against New Bern; it was actually the Baptists against the Methodists and that made everything jive with my own small town experiences.  Anyway, being Native American—yes a card carrying member of the Northern Cherokee Tribe of Missouri and Arkansas, specifically the White River Band—I liked the cowboys firing against each other.  I also liked the tank on the tracks.  Then the massive explosions reigning in from the sky were pretty cool.

But that was just the first few minutes and afterward a confusing array of progress happened in a very short amount of time.  Four weeks passed, but the officer with a broken leg was still taking up bed space at the medical center.  Television spewed again, as did the lights.  People were driving around again, unless they were forming poses.  Poses still require horses.  Jake and Emily were kissing. The high school was up and going.  For a minute there, I thought they had pulled a soap-opera switcharoo with Mimi, but no.  Stanley was settling with another agent and Mimi came running up the road to propose.  Besides the blood feud, all was quickly hunky-dorie and the Amish never really got a fair chance to shine, teaching survival skills and peaceful ways to the Baptists and the Methodists.  *Hmmm*.

I didn’t like the quick changes, but I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt.  Why I really like this show is that I know the series has an ending and they are building toward something.  When LOST first aired, I told my husband that the bar had been raised, that I hungered for more shows like this.  I knew LOST had an ending writers were building toward, a tangible plot I could drown in, and characters I couldn’t wait to know more about.  Mostly, I loved the idea that maybe, just maybe, I wouldn’t be watching Ross and Rachel get together for NINE long years.  I still would kill for a show with a beginning, middle and end, three seasons plain and clear, something without a long-term commitment, but something with structure and meat.  Jericho is taunting that hunger, like drinking a drizzle of water when you haven’t eaten food in days.  I’m willing to put up with the completely ludricrous portrayal of the Midwest just because I want to know about Robert Hawkins, the men who hunt him, and how the town of Jericho – yes, the people of the forgotten and sadly misrepresented Midwest – will repair the battered and broken Allied Patchwork Flag and turn it back into the United States of America.

The fact that this episode skipped around and lacked emotional bonding with the viewer – right up until Stanley proposed to Mimi – can be overlooked simply because they gave us more pieces of the puzzle that we were missing and waiting for.  They said outright that there were 23 American cities bombed, with fifteen million dead.  They showed on the map exactly where the country was divided and, *wooohooo*, they totally got Texas right, didn’t they?  Now I want to know where this will go.  I like Major Beck and wonder how he will play out, just as I wondered about Hawkins through the first season.  I feel they are building toward something that they might not drag out for the outdated seven seasons model. Maybe we’ll get answers, Stanley and Mimi’s quick wedding, and maybe just maybe, a little more diversity that reflects the Midwest and not L.A.  Then again, maybe the Studios still won’t get that we don’t like pointless dramas that go nowhere and they’ll just use the nuke.  Isn’t that how The Pretender ended?

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