Jericho

[Suzie]

Just a few episodes into season 2, anyone else watched this?

The basic premise is a small town (Jericho) that happens to be not quite near a massive nuclear attack, that turns out to be an attack on some number of US cities, simultaneously. The attack happens episode 1, and then everything else that follows is the aftermath of their completely changed world. It's pretty good, though occasionally some of the plot devices aren't quite accurate with regards to things like fallout, imo. Quite a few of the major characters have secrets, and interesting backgrounds to be figured out..

So yeah, anyone watching?

[Fish]

You know, I was going to watch this show; it was on CBS's website for a while, but they didn't have all of the episodes from the beginning, and I didn't want to start in the middle.

Now that you've reminded me, I'm gonna download and watch it.

On a slightly tangential note, I've been re-playing through the Fallout (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallout_%28series%29) games, which have a similar post-apocalyptic theme.

[Fish]

I downloaded the first season, and I'm only a few episodes in, but my initial impression is that, overall, it's a good show. It's engaging, and approaches the idea of small-town-america vs. global-nuclear-apocalypse with a decent amount of realism and ingenuity. Some other thoughts:


Things I Like:

A mysterious character with lots of guns and more knowledge than the viewer = plot possibilities
So far, no character is unrealistically like-able or unlikeable. No "superhero" characters or otherwise blatantly "leader/main character" characters (at least, none without a shady past)
So far, more or less scientifically accurate. Logistics is another thing, but again, any logistics regarding small-town-America vs. Nuclear-Apocalypse is going to be mostly conjecture.
The writers are frustratingly good at making you want to know what is going to happen (but not so much that I'm going to stop watching)



Gripes:

Even though I'm only a few episodes in, the problems the community is dealing with seem unrealistically optimistic/petty for a show about nuclear war.
Some plot lines seem beyond just petty, but seem to be about things that have little to no bearing on the actual premise of the show (aka, teenage love interest storylines)
The writers are frustratingly good at making you want to know what is going to happen next (but sometimes at the expense of what's actually happening on-screen, as in "I know that this will turn out well, but what will happen next?")



As I understand it, there is to be a second season. Very soon, I will be done with the first season, and will be able to state a more comprehensive opinion on whether that's a good idea or not, but speaking from the standpoint of a film-critic/writer, I would say that if they had planned it to be single season, they should keep it that way. If they had planned on 2-3 or more seasons, however, that's really just going to depend...


Will post again later.

[Fish]

some of the plot devices aren't quite accurate with regards to things like fallout, imo.

This is something I wanted to address separately from my previous post, as I noticed it too. Yeah, they seem to have taken a very tame stance with how radiation works on this show. Again, I'm only a few episodes in, but as I see it, after a nuclear war there are 3 types of areas: Incinerated, Irradiated, and soon-to-be irradiated. That doesn't make for very good TV, I suppose, and so they created a fourth type of area called "only-radioactive-when-we-need-a-plot-device", but again, it basically boils down to logistics that we're ultimately unable to work out until an actual nuclear apocalypse occurs. I don't really know enough about weather patterns, the nature of nuclear fallout, or the logistics of residual radiation to make a definitive statement on how realistic/unrealistic it all it, but I agree that it seems a little too sugar-coated (probably to make it a bit more appealing to the viewers who don't just want a show of people slowly melting to death over twenty-some episodes).