By Kenn Gold
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Nuts Online CEO, Jeffery Braverman poses with the raw peanuts that are to be roasted for sending to CBS. Photo from Nuts Online Website. |
CBS wanted a new kind of fan for the 2006/2007 season, and the network got its wish, though now may be sorry. In less than a week after the network announced the cancellation of the freshman drama
Jericho, fans have mobilized and have begun bombarding the network with calls for a renewal. Various campaigns are under way supported by the shows more than 8 million regular fans, and include sending in nuts (a reference to a line from the season finale spoken by Skeet Ulrich’s character), letters, emails, and jamming the networks fax machines. In fact, the first 1400 lbs of nuts arrived at CBS offices in New York this morning, with another 3100 pounds on the way.
Nuts Online an internet distributor has also gotten involved in the campaign, giving peanuts to the fans at wholesale prices, and aggregating smaller contributions into massive nut shipments. The company has also set up a website page with live updates of numbers and tonage at the following URL.
The campaign definitely had some effect, even before nuts started arriving. In an unprecedented move, CBS President of Entertainment, Nina Tassler, posted the following on the networks community message boards last Friday.
We have read your e-mails over the past few days and have been touched by the depth and passion with which you have expressed your disappointment. Please know that canceling a television series is a very difficult decision. Hundreds of people at the network, the production company and the incredibly talented creative team worked very hard to build and serve the community for this show -- both on-air and online. It is a show we loved, too.
Thank you for supporting Jericho with such passion. We truly appreciate the commitment you made to the series and we are humbled by your disappointment. In the coming weeks, we hope to develop a way to provide closure in the compelling drama that was the Jericho story.
A quick survey of the fan message boards for the show would seem to indicate that most of those participating will find no satisfaction in a quick wrap up of the series. In fact, Tassler’s email may have inspired some fans to even greater levels of action as they perceived the message as a weakening in the networks position. Though, earlier today, the LA Times reported that they had spoken to Ms. Tassler’s spokesman Chris Ender, who said that network executives would be meeting to discuss how the network can let fans know how the story would have ended.
Such fan based campaigns have worked well in the past, and contributed to the final decision to renew a show, possibly most notably with the efforts to save Roswell on the WB for a second season, and to persuade UPN to pick it up in a third, as well as efforts that led to the Serinity movie based on the show Firefly.
Many were expecting the show to find renewal, even up until the day of last weeks upfront presentation. Premiering strong early in the season with more than 13 million viewers, Jericho was perhaps damaged by a 12 week mid-season hiatus (a situation also shared by ABC’s Lost and NBC’s Heroes). No repeats of the show were aired during that time, and the show received little to no promotion from CBS. Jericho also faced the stiff competition of American Idol when it returned in the new year.
Thanks to Suzanne V. for correcting inaccuracies in the original article.
