As of last night, I have now watched the entire first season of the short-lived nuclear apocalypse series Jericho. The show was not the most sophisticated, though it had a compelling premise: Truck-mounted nuclear bombs destroy twentysomething U.S. cities, remaking the face of the nation into John Eldredge’s wet dream. Men and women are forced to become their primal selves if they have any hope to survive. The series focuses on the town of Jericho, Kansas, a small Main Street town complete with its own ne’er-do-well small-town mafioso, undercover CIA agent who knows what went down with the bombs, Aasif Mandvi, a paternalistic mayor, an IRS agent (played by a Coppola), a mayor’s-son-former-hellraiser turned loyal citizen, no gay characters, a whipsmart schoolteacher, and many more, all striving to maintain law and order and some semblance of a modern and democratic life. Everywhere else in the continent is either a refugee camp or a police state. So there is much to offer, but unfortunately, every episode is unimaginative in its execution, telegraphing both plot and character development. For example, if a sign at a market says “Thieves will be strung up,” then you can be sure someone in the party will steal something before the end of the episode, creating a dangerous conflict between the democratically-minded citizens and the police state they are visiting. (K & I have had fun predicting episode plots as we watch.) But really, the entire season can be summarized as the conjunction of two sets of people: those who can do shit, and those who can’t. It becomes the obligation of the people who can do shit to protect those who can’t, unless protecting those who can’t conflicts with family, work identity, or civic “duty,” however any of those things is construed for convenience’s or cliffhanger’s sake. The social experiment of the post-apocalyptic world as-seen-on-network-TV is a lot like every other kind of life as-seen-on-network-TV, with fallout.

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