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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."
First off, I'm sure that the people at CBS are enjoying the free lifetime supply of tasty peanuts. Hopefully they'll send back a thank-you card. Maybe one of those new Star Wars Hallmark cards. (After all, it's the least they can do.)
That being said, Jericho went off the air because the show took a wrong turn at Albuquerque. When it first started, the premise was intriguing. A post-holocaust world from the perspective of those who have no idea what could possibly be going on. It makes for a great setup. The first few episodes were even fairly good, with the early problems from the detonation wreaking all kinds of havoc. After that? Things went downhill.
Pretty soon the show was focusing more on love triangles than it was on the fact that everyone was just trying to survive. Emergencies were regularly forced into the story rather than the characters having to deal with realistic difficulties. There was so much that they could be exploring, yet the show was being "the O.C. after the bomb". (Or whatever the latest "pop" show is for stupid teenagers. Anyone remember that scene from Stargate-SG1 "200"? Yeah, that.)
As interesting as it had been, I just lost interest in the show. Checking my iTunes library, it looks like I stopped at "The Day Before". 13 episodes watched, and I just couldn't stand it anymore. So is it really any surprise that Jericho got cancelled?
I realize that many fans are begging for a conclusion to the cliffhanger, but that will pass with time. Remember the show Sliders? Remember how it died in the 5th season with both the main characters wiped out, Wade killed off in a twisted experiment, the reason for sliding gone, and a hokey story about a mad scientist stuck its the place? The show lost its purpose, yet the producers ended the season with a massive cliffhanger in hopes that fan outcry would bring the show back. And after watching the final episode, you do get a feeling of, "You can't leave it there!"
But in hindsight, it's best that it stayed off the air. There was about a zero point zero zero chance that the O'Connell brothers were going to return to the show, and the writing had been of poor quality anyway. If the show had returned, we would have gotten another season of the show's slow and agonizing death. Why? It was best that it was put out of its misery.
(Of course, the show "jumped the shark" in the third season with the loss of John Rhys-Davies, but at least the "finding Earth" and "looking for Ma and Pa" subplot was interesting.)
So I'm sorry to say this, but let it die. It was a nice try, but hopefully a better show will take its place.
Seriously.
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
This is expected to become the largest ever fan campaign to bring a television show back from cancellation.
Stop me when I've mentioned a fan campaign you've actually heard of. Like the campaign to get the third season of the original Star Trek. Or the one that got a Space Shuttle renamed. Or all those DVDs that got Family Guy back in regular episodes and Futurama in direct-to-DVD movies. Or the ridiculous amount of money Save Enterprise raised that threatened to make the fifth season purely on fan money (which, of course, led to all the controversy, but eh).
TV shows get cancelled. Millions are outraged. Then millions forget until Fox screws up the next show.
Wait, CBS you say? Weird. The token /. response doesn't work here. I think teh slash-verse is going to assplode!
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
Jericho had fans?
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.
...it was "Nuts!" and not "Crap!"
10. Fix the government
11. Various charity organizations
12. Protest something that matters
and of course
13. Profit
Why is it that when you believe something it's an opinion, but when I believe something it's a manifesto?
"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?
Talk to me in 3.5 years and lets see if Jericho is still in the top 100 of amazon sales.
I enjoyed the show, but I feel okay that it ended where it did. The so-called cliffhanger pretty well summed up the whole spirit of the show: stuff's really messed up, some people will descend into savagery, but others will hang together and try to keep things soldiering on. Sure, if they did decide to bring it back, we might learn how that final battle would have ended, but where to from there? Better to end on something of a high point* than to fizzle through a second, lackluster season.
*I say something of a high point because upon reviewing, it's clear how much better the early episodes were compared to the later ones. The more we learned about the bombs and the plot behind them, the less interesting the whole story became.
Watered-down - If a show is good, and gets good ratings, TPTB will require more seasons to be produced, than can be reasonably sustained at the same quality of the current story arc.
Word-of-Mouth - If a show is good, but gets so-so ratings in the begining, TPTB will cancel it before word of mouth can have an effect.
Sabotage - If any show is sabotaged by TPTB then there is no saving it. Examples are playing episodes out or order, or postponing the 2-hour premiere that introduces all the characters, to air as the season finale.
...isn't that CBS cancelled the show, but that it's being axed to make room for New Insipid Reality Show #462 and "Ooh! Pirates!"
The "Tiffany Network," eh?
Sam! If you will let me be,
I will try them.
You will see.
On the other hand - one series that I'm missing is Max Headroom, it's dark, it's about a near future and it's all about money, media companies, viewer figures and shady affairs. (Sounds familiar?)
It may be time to pick up the show again - the old episodes are a little outdated; no internet, no flat-screen TV:s etc.
But on the other hand RIAA and MPAA may not want to see this...
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
To quote from memory: "The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of wealth; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of misery." - Winston Churchill
;)
Forgive me if I butchered it.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
(getting a tan? gee, that's not superficial or anything....)
The difference is it doesn't cost $19,000 or $26,000 or whatever to get a tan... and if it does, whoever spends that much deserves all the ridicule they get. You could feed a family of four on that much money for a year - and we have no shortage of needy people in this country.
I'm not the kind of guy that goes around pointing out how all these vanity things we do are bad because that money could be better used elsewhere. Hey, if it makes you feel good, then whatever. But still, there's got to be a limit... a point where you say, "you know, this is kind of a ridiculous; there are more important things to worry about." It's not as if these people are getting anything tangible for their investment. They're sending a corporation a bunch of nuts. At least if you spent $26,000 on a tan, you'd still end up with a tan to show for it. These people may as well have just taken all that money and flushed it down the toilet. And that makes the whole thing kind of offensive.
I'll bet they're all really proud of themselves too.
Peanuts are legumes!
:(
The TV industry will never take us seriously now.
Do you really want these people trying to fix government?
Holland style? I would hope not, as Holland doesn't get any hurricanes. That's a good thing too, because we'd be well and truly fucked if we did.
Also, whilst tanning, read a fucking book.
Patriotism is a virtue of the vicious
Also, whilst tanning, read a fucking book. On skin cancer.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo.
I'll go one step further and say what needs to be said here.
Fuck Jericho.
Interesting premise?
yes
Interesting execution?
Not from the first fucking episode.
Friends of mine were obsessed with Jericho, but jesus, Jericho's writers couldnt write drama for shit.
Not even deaf meghan could save it for me, and she's fucking awesome.
'OMG, the world is coming to an end! but wait, you know what's even more interesting? bland interpersonal drama and bullshit quasi-moralistic plotlines and the melodramitcist of all melodramatic skeet ulrich performances!'
Dont care... dont care... *DONT* *CARE*
Fuck Jericho. With so much *decent* television on, its no wonder that CBS decided to pull a fox and replace a lackluster, if rabidly followed and obsessed over by its 3 fans, serial drama with a REALITY SHOW ABOUT CHILDREN BEING LEFT TO RUN A TOWN BY THEMSELVES. Yes, Jericho got replaced with Lord of The Flies 2: Electric Booglaloo: Lord of The Flies Reality TV.
Yes, this is flamebait.
Yes, I'm an asshole.
But,
No, I'm not wrong.
Fuck Jericho.
Shomer-FUCKING-shabbas!
Come read my stupid blagablog. Rants and Giggles
Hmm, you've given me an idea. Every time a politician does something that irritates you, post them a peanut. At the end of their term, they are put into a trebuchet, with the peanuts as the counterweight. Any that survive are permitted to stand for re-election. Any that don't are no longer part of the problem.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Oh sure, In Soviet Russia, nuts send CBS to you!
There's a Starman, waiting in the sky / He'd like to come and meet us, but he hasn't got the time.
So how long until a homeless guy who is allergic to peanuts sues CBS?
That's a surprisingly creative solution. The problem being, of course, that all the politicians will send each other tons of peanuts, and all knowing their impending doom, will unanimously change the law to avoid it.
Get a grip people, we all have lives outside of this TV show. This is so much more than just about a show. I'm terribly sorry that you did not stick around to see how the show progressed. Yes, Hawkins girlfriend was a very stupid plot, but thankfully she is now dead.
A great majority of the contributors to this campaign are business owners/executives. We are mostly comprised of very intelligent people, such as yourselves, which was why I was originally thrilled to learn we had made our mark here.... until I started reading all of this bashing.
Our movement is to speak out against 'the man' for all of this ridiculous programming. Most especially - REALITY TV. How lame can it get? Jericho is being replaced by a show about 40 CHILDREN, UNSUPERVISED, in New Mexico rebuilding a ghost town. My first thought is that these parents should be shot for allowing their children to take part in such a stupid idea. Jericho was only one of two shows that I watched on network TV. Yes, the other is Lost, come on, did you catch that season finale this week??
The next 'serialized' show that CBS will be bringing out mid season is called 'Swingtown'. Not swingsets or swingshifts, mind you, but a show about swingers in the 1970s. OK, the 1970s was known as the sexual revolution but I have a lot of arguments about this craziness. First, the demographics CBS is trying to reach by canceling Jericho - most weren't even born in the '70s yet! I was born in the early 70s and there is no way I could've been involved in any type of sexual revolution at the time! Who cares what a bunch of disco loving freaks were doing? Second, and even more importantly.... What about the FAMILIES who were watching Jericho. Do you really think that parents are going to want to sit there with their children to watch such an inappropriate show? My gawd! I'm in my mid 30s and wouldn't want to watch such a show with my parents!!
Quality TV is dead. Jericho was original, had a good plot and action. Was not sexually explicit, no excessive language, and aside from the obvious, did not have any graphic violence. It was a wonderful family show. These TV execs have got to get a freaking clue. That is what this movement is about.
Yes, I love this show. It was awesome. I could care less about who Jake ends up with... blonde or brunette... And, I am a woman. I want to know who wins the war. I want to know how the town will survive the next year - six months - whatever. I want to know WHO exactly dropped the bomb. I want to know if Jericho and others will be able to defeat this new government with the messed up flag and the man who seems to be the one behind the dropping of the bomb. I want to know who is on the train. I want to know how Hawkins is going to deal with them in a tank with no ammo. Put the blonde and brunette together, that will grab most of you driveling men. Just send Jake back out there to fight and save his town!
This is why we are sending nuts to CBS. And, as was pointed out above, the nuts are going to various charities. To the troops overseas, to the Bronx Zoo, to the homeless shelters. This has been at the request of the fans sending the nuts, as well as the company that is backing the campaign so fervently, www.nutsonline.com
OK, my last point, I promise. Recently we saw the end ratings for the season of the network shows. I don't recall the link, but it was on the Hollywood Reporter website. CBS renewed the stupid sitcom 'How I Met Your Mother' and it performed MUCH WORSE than Jericho. Don't tell me that this is business. This is plain-ass stupid!
Now if a simple girl from Kansas can fight for America's values and try to squash this nightmare of American Idol, why can't you?
This fight to Save Jericho is about larger issues. Too long Nielsen's flawed ratings system has controlled what is aired in North America and it's about time this ends. Jericho is quality television....... you can say what you will about television but it effects everyone's life in North America even if they don't watch it. As for that American Idol crap it's not only effecting television negatively it's also effecting music negatively.... Yeah fighting to save Jericho has bigger impact than just getting the show back on the air.
To all the haters, we get your point. I would remind each of you however that many years ago a letter writing campaign saved a show called Star Trek and got it two more seasons. Back then, that was unheard of but today campaigns of this nature (Save Jericho) and size are also unheard of. I'd like to remind the posters here that were it not for shows like Star Trek, a lot of our technological comforts might not exist today. Star Trek caused people to think about the technology involved and inspired generations of fans to create, explore and experiment with new technologies.
In a very loose comparison, Jericho has also caused many people to stop and think. In a world that is often times uncertain, Jericho took us away from our usual worries and got us to examine ourselves a little more closely.
In a world gone completely mad, the residents of Jericho struggled to keep their humanity about them. What would any of us do in the same situation? The show challenged us to think about just such a possibility. I grew up in the Cold War era and I remember a movie called The Day After. Back then, we had to think about a full out Nuclear War. Today we have to think about dirty bombs. Not much difference is there?
So, while you may hate the fans of this show for trying to save it, remember that a movement like this can show what's best about humanity because we have pulled together people from all over the free world and united them in one common voice. We've done it faster than anyone ever has and in larger numbers as well. CBS wanted to reach the 18-49 market and with new delivery methods like the Internet. They did reach us, but failed to recognize it and canceled our show. Now, we will fight to get it back and no ammount of criticism will impede us from finishing what we started. Keep hating our movement if you must, but we'll keep on truckin'.
20,000lbs of nuts, an ad in Variety and The Hollywood Insider, articles in the NYT, ABCnews.com, E!, syfiportal and countless local media outlets have been the first wave of our voices being heard. We know that they are being heard b/c the cBS execs have failed to strike the sets and have stopped returning the rented props for the show. Thanks to slashdot for helping us get the word out.
If you are interested in seeing what the show is about go to cbs.com\jericho and watch the episodes. If you lost interest in the middle of the season, go watch the second helf...it was really good. The love triangle is just a natural part of humantiy in a situation like that and was a part of the show...like it or not. It is resolved, and they move on in the second part of the season.
Save Jericho
NUTS to cBS
Thanks to nutsonline.com
jerichorallypoint.com
Shaun O'Mac and his radio show
and countless others who are working tirelessly to coordinate our campaign.
Joint the fight...it's not too late.
OK, the 1970s was known as the sexual revolution but I have a lot of arguments about this craziness. First, the demographics CBS is trying to reach by canceling Jericho - most weren't even born in the '70s yet! I was born in the early 70s and there is no way I could've been involved in any type of sexual revolution at the time!
Um... you could be a product of it
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
No - I think vetinarians should do it so it would be less cruel - although some skilled farm workers with those special pliers or rubber rings would be just as good.
Remember the cliffhanger from the season 2 finale of Weeds? Maybe Showtime will cancel Weeds to see what the fans will send in....