”Nuts.”
Such an innocuous line, yet as significant an utterance as prime time television has ever witnessed. After Jericho was canceled by CBS last spring, fans answered with one of the biggest (and, ultimately successful) campaigns aiming to resurrect their favorite series. Fans sent tons and tons of nuts to CBS, and CBS amazingly thought better of their decision and picked up Jericho for second (albeit short) season. The Jericho panel at Comicon (featuring Skeet Ulrich, Ashley Scott, Lenny James, and the key members of the production team. The mood was understandably jovial, with everyone on the panel genuinely ecstatic to be able to come back for a second season and constantly giving thanks to the fans.
The event kicked off with really cool clip package summing up the first season, set to The Killers’ “All These Things That I’ve Done”. It was one of those things that, even if you weren’t familiar with the series, you could feel the emotion of it all. The fans ate it up. Then, the panel was brought out and talked a lot about the show’s surprise resurrection. Everyone recounted how and where they heard the good news. It turns out that Skeet relayed the good news to a number of people, including Lenny James, who was awoken in the middle of the night (he lives in England) by a call from Skeet. In Lenny’s words, after Skeet told him the news, they “both screamed like little girls.”
Other than that, the producers imparted some cool pieces of news about the show and it’s upcoming second season.
The first episode of the new season will resolve what happened in the final battles quickly, and then jump forward a couple of weeks to show the government occupation of Jericho.
The government will be much bigger character (possibly the biggest) in season 2.
Esai Morales has joined the cast and will play a government official who is sent to hunt down Hawkins.
The writers had originally planned to show season two in three different perspectives from three different cities, but now that they only have seven episodes for season 2, they’re just going to show Jericho’s point of view.
After the panel talked for awhile they showed a clip from the upcoming season 1 DVD of Jericho. It showed the behind-the-scenes creation of Main Street using facades and sets and then some real locations, up through the filming of the pilot.
Although there wasn’t any new footage or big breaking news, the presentation was solid, featuring a passionate and gracious cast and crew.
-Oscar Dahl, BuddyTV Senior Writer
(Photo courtesy of Oscar Dahl)
Senior Writer, BuddyTV
