Don't get me wrong, it's not "Six Feet Under." I watched it for entertainment (?) and out of interest (okay, maybe some of it morbid!!) having grown up in the era of "duck and cover" and fallout shelters so long ago, as referenced in the show. I think there are some good subplots, the cookout (hello!!) was held because the store owner was looted (or "commandeered") to equip the shelters and she had nothing left except some meat which was going bad; Pamela Reed's character said, "Let's cook it up" since it would spoil anyway. Then the storekeeper points out to her young friend, "A 'thank you' would have been nice." There was another great scene when the Babe and the hearing-impaired girl were trapped with the bad guys pretending to be deputies, and the Babe snuck out to the commandeered police car and was radioing for help -- as slowly she changed frequencies up to the one the bad guy's radio was turned to. I thought that was cheesily but excitingly suspenseful!!! I was hoping the guy dying in the mine would turn out to be a victim of some over-zealous attempt to avoid panic (that his friends might have smothered him, as the real-life hospital staff in New Orleans may have Kerkorianed the helpless elderly, or the gripping scene about "the chicken" in the last episode of M*A*S*H; only to be rescued moments later).

Again it's not "Six Feet Under" and BTW I've been watching "Shark" and loving it!! A lot faster, wittier and more interesting than anything else I've seen except "Studio 60" (or the late "West Wing"). I thought "Smith" was weird even though I'm a big fan of Virginia Madsen. I won't even watch Ms. Heche although I dug Letterman's prelude to her interview ("Now Paul, this is interesting. She was gay. Right? Nothing wrong with that -- and now we find -- well, now she's NOT gay and that's absolutely fine too, of course...!!" (tongue in cheek, tongue in cheek!!)).

Okay, I'm just saying. All of TV (except, one hopes, the news) is basically escapism in one form or another, I mean, some people watch "Wheel of Fortune." I do go to Salon for amusing and enlightened comments and I find this column almost always entertaining, and often on target (for me). But other times like a lot of things in Salon it seems a little arch. There's nothing wrong with caring about a bunch of familiar-seeming people dealing with the unthinkable and frankly the writers have come up with a few dilemmas already I hadn't thought of -- maybe I watched too many "Twilight Zones" and other shows as a kid but the social commentary seems woven right in, to me!!! What if "others" come, what do we do with bad guys (the escaped prisoners) how do we compensate the store owner (for instance) for her depleted inventory, who's in charge (McRaney's collapse turning into "the flu" did seem a bit coy when he was apparently DOA the previous week). I'm not saying it's brilliant. And maybe I have no life(!!) and if I did, I'd be embarrassed by what I'm writing!! Maybe I already should be, but I don't think that goes for the writers of "Jericho." After 9-11 we are all looking at a different world and heretofore unthinkable possibilities. Having grown up during a similar time (Cuban missile crisis, etc.) maybe I'm just nostalgic for a time when The End of the World As We Know It was an-almost quaint plotline, compared to the lies, battlefield amputations, rape and murder of children in a schoolroom, government-sanctioned torture, total erosion of public education, healthcare and, well, ethics and compassion in general, that I see on "real" television (the news) and probably, very little of that makes it to the screen either. Not disagreeing exactly (okay "Jericho" has a lot of "Wait, why didn't this happen when they did that" moments); but saying, Hey, some of us don't mind it a little cheesy and even get a kick out of it, in a morbid, and/or nostalgic way!!!