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"Jericho" Fans Send Over Nine Tons of Nuts to CBS
nuts-to-CBS writes "After presenting 'Jericho' fans with a cliffhanging season finale, CBS promptly cancelled the program. The shocked fans quickly banded together, many using CBS' own public "Jericho" discussion forum, and began brainstorming on ways to convince the network to bring back the show for a second season. A plot point in the final episode of "Jericho" involving the expletive "Nuts!" (in reference to an historic conversation between generals) was turned into a campaign to send large quantities of nuts to CBS' NY, LA, and affiliate offices. Fans have sent a total of $26,000 for a pooled campaign hosted at Nuts Online to ship over 19,000 pounds of peanuts to CBS.
Other efforts acquired over $9,000 to publish full page advertisements in
Variety (National Edition)
and The Hollywood Reporter for Tuesday, May 29th. This is expected to become the largest ever fan campaign to bring a television show back from cancellation." There's more about the massive fan rollout below.
CBS created rich, interactive content online to accompany their show "Jericho," in order to extend its fan base
to the Internet-savvy, TiVo-owning generations. Despite suffering through the all-too-familiar mid-season
hiatus employed by many shows, the "Jericho" fan base remained strong throughout the break, partially due to the episodes being posted both for free on the CBS site as well as for purchase on iTunes. "Jericho" returned from the hiatus in the same timeslot occupied by "American Idol." CBS — which apparently still
determines programming primarily on Nielsen ratings — decided to drop the show, regardless of the ever-growing
and loyal fan base. Nuts Online includes live blogging from Jeffrey Braverman, the
company's 26-year old CEO. Jeffrey's company has been shipping up to 5,000 pounds of peanuts a day to the CBS New
York headquarters, and has been using their site to describe his experience along the way. Three other fan sites are documenting the progress:
CBS Jericho Message Board,
Jericho Lives, and
Jericho Rally Point. Fans of Roswell were successful in bringing back their favorite program by sending mass quantities of
tiny bottles of Tabasco sauce."
I'm sorry but the campaign to save the StarTrek Enterprise series for a 5th year was far larger. This quick search garnered a BBC News story showing over 3million US raised and if my memory serves correctly the fans were close to 20 million before being told that there was no way ?paramount? would run another series without an industry backer. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/4312767.s tm
They will be donated to City Harvest, a New York-based program that takes excess food and distributes it to community food programs for the poor, according to Phil Gonzales, a CBS spokesman. Some of the nuts are also on their way to troops in Iraq and Afghanistan through the Staten Island Homefront Project.
"This is expected to become the largest ever fan campaign to bring a television show back from cancellation."
I've never seen Jericho, and I bet the series is great, (I just watch very little TV nowadays) but
This makes me wonder how this will compare to the "save farscape" media frenzy that lots and lots of 'scapers took action to get Sci-Fi's rectal-cranial inversion syndrome diagnosed, and cured. It was on CNN Headline News for chrissakes!
All in all, I'll probally check out Jericho now. Good luck to all the Jericho fans, I hope you get your show back.
da w00t. mtfnpy?
1 (and part of 4)) No matter how you cut it, it is a top 50 or top 25 show. At a minimum, it is higher rated than 2/3 of everything else on TV.
2 Nielsen is obsolete because even if one watches on TV, it could be Tivo'd. Nielsen captures an ever DECREASING portion of televsion viewers -- those that actually sit on a couch and watch a show as it airs. New Media viewers don't schedule their time around a network. Nielsen is a dinosaur in the Old Media world.
3 There are no stats to argue this, so we will just have to agree to disagree
4 CBS' crisis is more that 20,000 pounds of peanuts. It is a public releations nightmare. Full page ads are in this coming Tuesday's Variety Weekly and Hollywood Review. News coverage is already jumped to mainstream with ABC and (ironically) all major CBS affliciates running it. Power blogger Michelle Malkin has front paged it, which means Drudge will follow shortly. Love them or hate them, they command 20+ million hits per day between them. CBS is stuck in neutral and cannot pimp their new season lineup until they resolve this.