SHTF TV? -Jericho

[twenty711]

Did any of you watch Jerrico tonight? I started to but was interupted. It looked like a shtf nuclear attack on the US in multiple cities. Did anyone catch it? What were your impressions?

 

[DRMMR02]

I saw it. It was alright. The crappy soft-rock kind of intro that so many network TV dramas use made me think it's going to become a soap opera real fast. I will probably watch it for a few episodes to see what they do. I have a feeling though once the writers run out of SHTF ideas and some in-show time passes, it will turn into another who-is-sleeping-with-who, who-is-backstabbing-who show.

SEMI-SPOILER-ALERT

They really focused more on the emotional-drama aspects more than anything we talk about in our SHTF scenarios. There's this guy who is the son of the mayor, but they are estranged. And he redeems himself by rescuing a bus load of kids and performing an amateur tracheotomy on some little girl who can't breath. There is the usual neighbors fighting over supplies but then pull together out of neighborly love after a pep talk from the mayor.

 

[22-rimfire]

I watched it. Two A-bombs known at this point. The source is not known as to who attacked the US. Jericho KS is without electricity. No nuclear fall out (yet). One blast was visible in the distance from Jericho. Things are just begining to be sorted out. Escaped prisonors. It may be an interesting show. There is a great deal of flexibility in the story line. People, survival, crime, nuclear attack, medical, law & order, rebuilding, food, refugees, etc. I'll be watching.

 

[LoadedDrum]

I saw it too. I think it plays like a decent "movie of the week". I just hope there is more Ashley Scott in the next episode.

 

[ilbob]

I wonder how long it will take before the town gets together and discovers the most critical thing to do is turn in all the guns now in civilian hands to the authorities. For the children.

 

[HankB]

Call me a cynic, but I wonder how many episodes we go through before they make it clear that the enemy that attacked isn't who we thought it would be, but a group of blond Aryan Christian fundamentalists . . .

After all, when Clancy's The Sum of All Fears was made into a movie, they changed the bad guys to Nazis . . .

This is one of those times I hope I'm wrong . . .

 

[telomerase]

I was afraid this was a thread on "Which TV to use during SHTF"... that is what most people would consider the greatest necessity. Obviously some sort of solar-recharged battery-powered setup that also plays DVDs... otherwise the sheeple will miss their Matrix fix and stop being brain-eating zombies, thus causing the end of civilization as we know it.

 

[bruss01]

Anyone besides me surprised that JW or some other mod hasn't shown up yet to close this thread because it doesn't meet their standards of "on topic"?

So, what's the best gun to use to take out an incomming ICBM? My bet is on a Barrett .50 BMG, but you'd have to get just the right angle to hit it at missile velocity, meaning you'd essentially have to be standing on the proposed Ground Zero. Better make that first shot count.

There, how's that for "gun related" and "strategy and tactic for taking out a nuclear event".

 

[Panthera Tigris]

I'll say before the thread is closed I thought it was ok.

Not as good as the Showtime series a few years ago called Jeremiah however.

 

[Rupestris]

To keep it on topic...

I did watch and noticed a couple things.

1,The citizens that were in the back of the pick-up were all armed with long guns.

2, When Jake drives into town he looks to his right to see a store with "Gun's, Ammo, Gifts" on the window.

3, When the mayor is in the police station there is a poster behind the counter with the silouette of a rifle on it that reads "Guns can kill..." . The rest of the poster was obscured.

4, The pocket knife was a bone handled slip-joint. Not a tactical, waved, G10, titanium, super-steel, wonder knife. On the other hand, it did not portray a pocket knife as a weapon but as a useful tool. No one ran out of the bus screaming when he opened it.

5, The guy with the Ham radio racks a pumpgun and points it at the mayor. The mayor tells him to put it down but does not panic/wet himself/etc...

I'll watch a couple more episodes. Its better than Dancing with the stars.

 

[Brian Williams]

I did not watch it, keep us posted how they protray gunnies/ "the gun culture"

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[Lou629]

It would have possibilities, if...

the producers could manage to keep away from the typical 'soap-opera' plots. If the guys at the networks could get some really good writers, like the ones who write for HBO 'The Wire', 'Sopranos', etc., they could really make this interesting, but this will probably fall into all the predictable same-o, same-o story lines. If that's the case i give it this season and maybe one more at best.

 

[AJ Dual]

Next week (presumably the next day in the show's timeline) looks to be when the fallout comes, preumably from the Denver bomb to the west.

Prediction: Iin the "crisis management scene" as "Major Da…", I mean, the mayor, is walking into the police station he's arguing with the mine manager to get his men out of the mine. That's where the town will hide from the fallout next week…

I think the "voice of reason" black man who was "ex-St. Louis PD" offering his help to the police and rebuffed, then helps the fire department maintain order with the genset construction lights will turn out to be some kind of retired crisis management, big city police chief, homeland security guru, who'd just moved to Jericho to retire.

I thought the nerdy kid who's mom died on the answering machine with her BF in Atlanta was a melodromatic touch, but not really possible. EMP would have sozzled the line the instant the blast went off.

My wife told me to shut up… LOL.

Small elecrtics are more EMP resistant than people think, but things attached to long runs of wire that act as antennas (or actual antennas) to gather and focus the EMP will get fried.

If the show makes it, i'll probably watch it until the town "settles in" and things start to get episodic. If they do a decent job keeping the show on topic and follow the bombing/war in one long story arc, and not "visitor of the week stirring up trouble", and keep the soap opera of who was high-school sweethearts with who to a minimum, I'll stay.

But the odds of network TV doing that are infestimaly low. It'll devolve into soap quickly, but I'll watch until it does.

 

[DRMMR02]

Next week (presumably the next day in the show's timeline) looks to be when the fallout comes, preumably from the Denver bomb to the west.

Prediction: Iin the "crisis management scene" as "Major Da…", I mean, the mayor, is walking into the police station he's arguing with the mine manager to get his men out of the mine. That's where the town will hide from the fallout next week…

I think the "voice of reason" black man who was "ex-St. Louis PD" offering his help to the police and rebuffed, then helps the fire department maintain order with the genset construction lights will turn out to be some kind of retired crisis management, big city police chief, homeland security guru, who'd just moved to Jericho to retire.

I thought the nerdy kid who's mom died on the answering machine with her BF in Atlanta was a melodromatic touch, but not really possible. EMP would have sozzled the line the instant the blast went off.

My wife told me to shut up… LOL.

Small elecrtics are more EMP resistant than people think, but things attached to long runs of wire that act as antennas (or actual antennas) to gather and focus the EMP will get fried.

If the show makes it, i'll probably watch it until the town "settles in" and things start to get episodic. If they do a decent job keeping the show on topic and follow the bombing/war in one long story arc, and not "visitor of the week stirring up trouble", and keep the soap opera of who was high-school sweethearts with who to a minimum, I'll stay.

But the odds of network TV doing that are infestimaly low. It'll devolve into soap quickly, but I'll watch until it does.

That's a really good post. I agree completely. I also think the guy from St. Louis will turn out to have a shady past to thicken the plot. He seems too good to be true.

On topic, was anyone else not impressed with the way the deputies handled the prison bus? He walks in there, doesn't even look at the side of the bus or notice it's not yellow, see the cuffs and the body, and just stands there without drawing his weapon and securing the scene. And end up getting smoked due to his lack of foresight and protocol.

 

[dfaugh]

I'll reserve judgement until I see what the writers do with it. There's a lot that could be done, but I suspect when they run out of "serious" plot lines(SHTF related), it'll devolve into a soap opera format. 50-50 chance it'll last the season.

 

[jason10mm]

Hopefully the show does not try to follow "Lost" with a bunch of weirdness,etc. Jake already has a needlessly "mysterious" past that seems to make no sense. Even if he is an ex-con, why keep saying he was military? If he was military, why keep changing the service? He doesn't ssem capable enough to be a super-secret spy or something, nor does it appear that he set the Denver bomb and just happened to have family nearby (which would be an interesting twist).

I have not spent much time in Kansas, but it seems to be a pretty panic-immune area, with lots of scattered small towns what are probably on good terms with each other and not a large urban population that would disperse and overwhelm the rural locals.

If the town was in New York State or something I would expect a bunch of refugees, but not here. Basically any place farther than 1 tank of gas from a city should be pretty safe since few would make it that far.

We don't actually know if the explosions are nuclear, do we? Can't a large enough conventional bomb raise up a mushroom cloud? I guess the dead birds at the end signify radiation though. The total loss of communications implies a widespread EMP, not just failure of local services. What about satellite TV or the internet? Why would cell phones and land lines fail, yet cars and generators still work? Either there is a bit of EMP handwaving or something more insidious is going on (combined hacker attack with NBC attacks).

You'd think it would be a simple matter to have some good 'ole boys drive to the next couple of towns, even off to Kansas City. Ought to be able to make it in a day or so. I would hardly expect "Road Warrior" style highwaymen to spring up so quickly.

Oh, for the gun stuff, I liked that fact that lots of guys had slung hunting rifles and shotguns. Looks to be some gunplay next week as well, probably those escaped convicts. Hopefully there is at least one collector in town who gets to make a big show of arming the head-in-the-sand sheeple who never thought they would need a gun. Doubtful though, the collector will probably turn out to be a NRA white supremacist and his stuff will be confiscated "for the common good".

 

[USMC - Retired]

A few things caught my attention. I grew up in Kansas and unless the landscape changed a whole lot since I left, I feel certain in stating that there is no spot in Kansas that you can see mountains from. Also, the Mountains were between Jericho and Denver! Help me out here Colorado folks, did a mountain range spring up east of Denver that I don't know about? A drive to Kansas City would be pointless, there are numerous large cities between western Kansas and KC, most notably being the State Capitol Topeka. At most a 8 hour drive if the roads weren’t damaged a bit longer if they were damaged but in most spots you could pull off the road to drive around a problem. They didn't seem to be able to raise anyone on he Hamm radio, highly unlikely that after a major attack. More likely would be that you couldn't get a word in edgewise due to all the radio traffic.

 

[CTI1USNRET]

The radfo will cause animals to mutate and they will soon find themselves living in Jurassic Park.

"Gotta find a bigger box."

Radfo = Radiological Fallout. I spent my first 8 yrs in the Navy as a weather guesser (AG). I did daily radfo forecasts based on 1 MT and 5 MT yield bursts over selected east coast cities.

 

[GEM]

Not a bad show. I'm waiting for the cliff hanger Zombies at the end of the season. Gotta have zombies.

BTW, just finished World War Z by Brooks - great, realistic struggle against zombies. It even has a discussion of the optimum zombie gun and H2H bladed weapon for zombies.

 

[1 old 0311]

The son told his Father, Mayor, he was in the Army. Then he told the hot blonde he was in the Navy. Then he did a PERFECT treck on the kid on the bus??????? Sorry to see his Road Runner get trashed

 

[ChopperKen]

I hate when they trash a nice old car like that.
Even if it was a Mopar...

 

[Father Knows Best]

A few things caught my attention. I grew up in Kansas and ....

I guaran-dam-tee you that the idjits writing that show have never set foot in Kansas, or any other midwestern or plains state. That's "fly-over country" to them -- the big empty area you cross while jetting between New York and California. They might as well have set it in Siberia, or Shangri-La, as they'd have about as good of a chance of accurately representing those places and people.

 

[AJ Dual]

We don't actually know if the explosions are nuclear, do we? Can't a large enough conventional bomb raise up a mushroom cloud? I guess the dead birds at the end signify radiation though.

Any conventional explosive big enough to make an over-the-horizon visible mushroom cloud, with that much ancilary light would be way to large to hide.

The MOAB size bombs, and some conventional explosives tests can make some pretty big mushroom clouds, but you won't get the flash and glow that lasts that long, only a nuke makes enough heat for that.

Actualy, at a couple hundred miles, you probably wouldn't be able to see the nukes except for a "heat lightning effect" of light scattering in the sky either, but they had to give the audience something for dramatic effect. And if it was terrorists, they'd just be kiloton nukes, probably not much more than 10-100kt tops, not multi-megaton H-bombs, because concealability and transportability becomes an issue.

The total loss of communications implies a widespread EMP, not just failure of local services. What about satellite TV or the internet? Why would cell phones and land lines fail, yet cars and generators still work? Either there is a bit of EMP handwaving or something more insidious is going on (combined hacker attack with NBC attacks).

EMP effects are somewhat overstated in popular fiction. Anything several hundred miles from a blast, and not hooked into long pieces of metal like land-lines, antennas, or fences stands a better chance of surviving than commonly thought. So cars and handheld electronics could well work fine, while interconnected services fail. Also, things like TV's may well still "turn on" but the more delicate functions like tuning, or IC's that control the settings could be fried. Surge strips, UPS's, and lightning arrestors can help plugged in electronics survive too. Also, a groundburst can't throw EMP as far as an airburst can. Presumably a large terrorist nuclear plot would be less likely to have the means of air-delivery...

If a dedicated EMP blast was set off several hundred miles over the earth, that would be worse, as there's no horizon to cut down on the EMP, and the EMP can be magnified by interacting with the ionosphere and Earth's magnetic field. (As they found out during that infamous Navy nuclear test near Hawaii in the Pacific...) but that takes either a secret satellite nuke, or a ballistic missile, and is still mostly the realm of somethign a first-world power, the US, Russia, Israel, India, or China could pull off.

Actualy though, the power probably would have gone out sooner, as the EMP would have overloaded breakers across the grid and created a cascade failure like the infamous northeast/NYC/Canadian blackouts. The miles and miles of power lines would have collected a pretty massive EMP surge.

Although I think they got it at least somewhat right, when the ex-cop "wise man" ("Are you sure you aren't the science teacher") suggested that it was a cascade failure from all the missing demand from destroyed cities, and that remote power plants could still be intact...

They didn't seem to be able to raise anyone on he Hamm radio, highly unlikely that after a major attack. More likely would be that you couldn't get a word in edgewise due to all the radio traffic.

While they got the HAM from the "kook", I'm not sure that they tried it yet... Can anyone remember?

 

[The Burnside Ninja]

Did anyone notice that for a little "po' dunk" town of Jericho, they only had one guy in the crowd with a shotgun??? I don't know about you, but I've lived in Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, South Carolina and Central Florida- so I've seen some "backwoods" towns. There's no way in hell that only one guy would have a gun. There would be tons of guys bearing arms and waiting to defend their land.

 

[Dr.Rob]

1. what happened to "the flash"... everyone knows the FIRST thing you'd see is the flash, then later the cloud as it rose in the distance.

2. OK there is no mountain range between Denver and Kansas, but I'll cut them some slack on "the effect of something happening beyond the horizon"

3. they have civil defense gieger counters (marked CD) but no civil defense radio? Poor planning in apost 9-11 world, though they may comment on that later. Civil defense suppliescover a lot of ground.

4. there were a LOT of people with shotguns at the gas station and I was happy they didn't show the grow resorting to shoot 'em up at the first sign of crisis.

5. the kid putting away the groceries in the cooler was a neat scene.

6. OF COURSE the only guy with a ham radio is the art bell looney with a shotgun, rather than some old retired fart from the FCC.

7. the 'opponent' of the mayor causing trouble at the first sign of breakdown was stupid and predictable. Even the Dems' didn't scream "it was all Bush's fault! while the buldings were still falling.

8. Gerald Mcrainey (sp?) the mayor is a REAL pro-gun guy.

9. Skeet has a 'mysterious' past surprise.

10. Skeet's car should be destroyed... nope it miraculously survived a head on collision with a dent in the left rear. The car will be back. Mark my words.

11. Racism inferred on the black former cop, guess who the next sherriff of Jericho is?

12. nHEY SHERRIFF we gotta busted up bus fulla convicts! Hold on Jimmy I need to TURN MY BACK INSIDE THE BUS to hear you. That was just silly. And it was silly that the School bus driver apparently took an 'unknown route' to a field trip... couldn't SOMONE have chacked with a teacher, or the school principle? Oh yeah they were up at Jeery's Ranch for a 4H field trip--here's the route.

13. The dead birds were sort of cool.

14. No CB's? In Kansas? Rural Kansas?

15. oh and I'm in Denver so I'm dead. But I'll probably watch it again.