WonderCon 2008: Jericho

Leading off the Hall A presentations this morning was Jericho, a science fiction drama about a midwest town after nuclear bombs had wiped out a lot of the big cities, throwing the United States into chaos. Jericho is now entering into its second season, after a fan campaign of sending peanuts to the network granted them another order of seven episodes, enough to tell about a third of what they originally envisioned for season 2.

They started off the session with the entire episode from Jericho, and brought on stage Lennie James (Hawkins), Brad Beyer (Stanley), Alicia Coppola (Mimi) and executive producer Carol Barbee. Before the start of anything, they thanked all the fans for saving their show and the cast and crew had made a video to thank all the fans who sent in peanuts. The fan who spearheaded that effort is now helping Obama's campaign.

The take home points from the session: keep watching Jericho, if you DVR Jericho, play the entire episode through to the end, buy the DVDs. The Nielsens are broken, and they know it, but now the internet fan base Jericho has captured the attention of the network execs, but the execs are still trying to figure out how they can make money from it.

They filmed two different endings for the last show of Jericho; one will lead into Season 3, the other will end the show.