Poor Skeet Ulrich. His big liquid brown eyes have been staring down at me from the sides of buses and the top of taxi cabs for weeks now, pleading: "Please watch my new show. It's the best job I've had in years."

So of course I've been watching Jericho -- how could I refuse? Skeet may be the made-for-TV Johnny Depp, but ya gotta take yer ersatz Johnny Depps where you can find them. Also: the whole nuclear war thing? I still haven't gotten over the trauma I experienced as a kid of being absolutely convinced I was going to be vaporized in a mushroom cloud. They were still doing duck-and-cover drills when I was in elementary school in the late 70s, and even as a second-grader I grasped how completely ineffectual my elbows were going to be against a 500MPH firestorm.

So of course I was drawn to Jericho, like a moth to a million-degree flame. And I'm still stuck on it so far, even though it's not very good. Oh, Skeet has grown on me, out of sheer regularity of exposure. Not his character, or indeed any of the characters: they seem kinda dumb, like they've failed to realize that civilization as they know it has ended -- it feels like they're all just hanging around waiting for the power to come back on. Even when they're not. Even when, as in last night's episode, the Cute Farmer Guy found all the bugs in his corn and then we had to endure a whole subplot about pesticides. Everyone's acting like things will go back to the way they used to be: no one seems to be acting like that corn -- and perhaps Skeet's stolen horses -- are gonna be the only thing they'll have to eat once the trainload of Dinty Moore stew runs out. Does Cute Farmer Guy imagine he'll set up a roadside stand to sell the corn to the fine, starving people of Jericho, and that they won't merely descend upon him and his crop like the desperate, ravaging hoards they're going to be? And how does he imagine they'll be paying for it? (So adorable, the Spoiled Rich Girl, attempting to bail out Dorky Kid Who Likes Her with her gold AmEx. I'm thinking all these people deserve to be wiped out.) Sure, Mayor Major Dad and his Goodwife seemed to have an inkling of the deprivation to come, but if this town has any hopes of survival, someone -- like the mayor or, God help us, Not Johnny Depp -- is going to have to become a local despot, organizing everyone and figuring out the food situation and so on. And if the town is lucky, he'll be a benign despot with everyone's best interests at heart, and not someone -- like Horse Thief Guy -- who's just being a jerk.

Come the apocalypse, concepts like due process, private property, and the Bill of Rights are going to be obsolete as, well, all those cell phones the kids were hitting like baseballs last night. In some parallel universe, there's a much better written version of Jericho that's exploring these ideas. The most entertaining aspects of this Jericho, however, so far are the atrocious scripts that are way more in love with the soap opera of Skeet's Brother Who's Cheating on His Wife, Cute Farmer Guy and IRS Bitch who hate each other so much that you just know they have to end up together, and the Mayor's Goodwife Who's Trying to Keep Her Family Together, Dammit. It makes for some highly amusing dialogue: "It's the end of the world out there, Ma!" Skeet -- or was it Skeet's Brother? -- just about said last night, to which Ma pretty much replied, "It's the end of the world in here, too, Son," while jabbing a disappointed finger melodramatically over her own heart. That's good-bad stuff.

I'm more and more convinced, though, with each passing episode, that Things Are Not What They Seem. There's a reek of trying-to-be-Lost desperation stinking up the town, what with Skeet's mysterious, haunted past -- you wanna say to him, "We know Jack Shephard, Skeet, and you're no Jack Shephard" -- and the Secretive Black Guy, who clearly is Up to No Good. I bet it's all a big psychological test, either the gubmint experimenting on citizens, or research by aliens into human behavior, or they're all in the Matrix, or something. Of course, I've been convinced of all those things about *Lost,* too. I'm not sure if I'll be able to stick with Jericho for years and years in order to find out, unless it starts getting interestingly weird. First sign of a polar bear, though, and I'm outta there.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
MaryAnn Johanson
author of The Totally Geeky Guide to The Princess Bride
minder of FlickFilosopher.com

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