I Like to Watch

Oct. 8, 2006 | The TV business doesn't make any sense to me. Writers spend all this time and energy on a pilot -- coming up with a riveting story, making the dialogue clever and snappy, hinting at interesting relationships between compelling characters -- in order to sell either a half or a whole season's worth of shows. Once a network or cable station bites, the champagne corks fly, the actors embrace, a staff of writers, many of whom weren't involved in the pilot, are hired, and everyone hopes that the show will get good enough ratings to stick around.

But just as you can't judge a book by its cover -- unless its cover features a woman in a corset being ravaged by a steely-jawed man in very tight pants -- you can't judge a TV show by its pilot. Just like first dates, pilots are often much better or much worse than subsequent episodes end up being. No matter how alluring and provocative a pilot might seem on your first date with it, no matter how you swoon and giggle and program it into your TiVo, looking forward to a lifetime together -- OK, maybe just a season or two; let's not get ahead of ourselves -- there's no guarantee that by the second or third episode, you won't find yourself sullenly staring at the screen, thinking, "What did I ever see in this loser?"

Skeet shooting
That's how I felt after watching the third episode of CBS's "Jericho" last week (8 p.m. Wednesdays). I really loved the pilot, what with all of the mass hysteria and the voice messages from dead parents and the mushroom clouds billowing in the distance. I loved the apocalyptic gloom that hung in the air, and the way that the townspeople gasped in horror at every new bit of information that trickled in from the outside world. Atlanta and Denver, both flattened by nuclear bombs, and no news or radio or Internet reports about what happened or who could be responsible for such widespread destruction.

Sure, there were little, nagging signs that the show might not hold my interest. Our hero, Jake (Skeet Ulrich), had sort of a blank, wide-eyed, open-mouthed look on his face throughout the entire pilot, which made watching him like staring at a cartoon face that's missing a few crucial features. His love interest, a blond ex-girlfriend named Emily (Ashley Scott), seemed unburdened by a discernible personality, and his second-string love interest, a more regular-looking, down-to-earth schoolteacher named Heather (Sprague Grayden), showed a remarkable lack of flair and spirit, considering that the end of the world was looming ever present. Mom (Pamela Reed) and Dad (Gerald McRaney) didn't have much to do beyond fussing over Jake and fussing over the town, respectively. But every time I started to think, "Hmm, this seems a little dull," someone would have a spectacular meltdown, or folks in town would loot the local grocery store, or someone would end up walking down a freeway covered in dead birds, and those deliciously ominous moments sort of erased the dull moments from my memory.

Still, the second episode was far worse: Criminals from a local prison escaped and took Jake's ex-girlfriend hostage, resulting in some cheesy slow-motion gunplay so badly directed and edited, you'd think you were watching the student film of a Quentin Tarantino fanatic -- you know, the kind of guy who communicates entirely by quoting scenes from "Reservoir Dogs"? Then the nuclear storm clouds threatened, which meant that all of the townspeople had to crowd into a clinic shelter and a mine, and then the mine was (perhaps foolishly?) sealed off with an explosion on purpose, I suppose in order to kill most of the people inside so that they didn't have to die slowly and painfully from radiation sickness. Meanwhile, a local teenage girl dodged the horrors of radiation simply by taping a plastic tarp to the front door of her big house and spending the day with the local misfit kid. Why didn't all those townsfolk go to her house instead of crowding into a dusty mine? Well, because, that would prevent the popular teenage girl and the resident weirdo from playing a game of cards and becoming, like, sorta like friends!

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