Just Stop It! Stop Dangling Jericho in Front of Us, Stop It NOW!!! (I Am A TV Junkie)

It's just getting ridiculous. As a one-time fan of the show, this has got to end. I no longer have any decent memories of the show because all that's crammed into the fold in my brain labeled "CBS Jericho" is all the stops and starts and nuts and grateful actors and dubious studio execs and disappointment.

During the CBS TCA presentation, Jon Turtletaub, who's the producer of Harper's Island, the limited series that debuts on the network April 9, brought up during the session that he's developing a stand alone Jericho feature film.

He said (iFilmMagazine.com):

“We’re developing a feature for JERICHO,” says Turteltaub. “It would not require you to have seen the TV show, but it get into life after an event like this on a national scale. It would be the bigger, full on American version of what’s going on beyond the town in Jericho.”

And what about the TV cast – would they return?

“Oh yeah!”

And would it be a huge budget?

“Anything would be a huge budget compared to what we were dealing with,” he adds. “If we had $40 million dollars to make a movie with, that’s 20 times more than we did before.”

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm of the school of thought that says, "Let it go. It's over."

About Harper's Island, the whole thing is very hush hush, the Los Angeles Times reporting that even the star of the show, Elaine Cassidy, couldn't tell the audience watching her on closed circuit from an undisclosed location where indeed that undisclosed location is.

Mindy Farabee at the Times calls it "a sort of romance-crime show-"Ten Little Indians" hybrid, in which each week a different head rolls."

And the story ends at the end of each season, like, say, Survivor. Turtletaub explains to the Times:

"Reality shows really changed the way we watch television, and the dramatic programs haven't yet figured out how to capitalize on what the reality shows discovered in the audience's viewing habits."

The unscripteds, he believes, created a demand for self-contained event programming that scripted entertainment could easily fill, and networks are just beginning to understand that.

"When we pitched the show they kept asking us, 'What about Season 2, what about Season 2?' And we kept saying, 'Season 2 would be a whole new story, a whole new cast, a whole new adventure,' which is really fun for an audience. . . . And light bulbs started to go off."

Harper's Island will premiere on April 9. Trailer after the jump.

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