Back from the dead

The story of “Jericho” -- not the story within the show but the story of the show itself -- highlights a fundamental problem with American network television. Because the traditional and current business model seeks to field shows that will potentially run forever, even as they are in constant danger of cancellation, the vast wasteland is littered with unfinished stories. It hardly seems fair, either to the people who make them or the people who watch them.

CBS canceled “Jericho” last spring at the end of its first season. Disgruntled fans responded by sending 20 tons of peanuts to the network headquarters, echoing a line from the series -- “Nuts,” as in “to you,” but also as in “We’re nuts about ‘Jericho.’ ” The result was a seven-episode midseason reprieve that begins this week

The story “Jericho” tells is of a small Kansas town trying to get its bearings and protect itself from post-apocalyptic chaos in the aftermath of a multi-city act of nuclear terrorism. Still, time has been found for love to bloom and families to squabble. It has been like a soap opera with guns and a nuclear bomb stashed in one mysterious citizen’s basement.

At the end of Season 1 -- by which time the terrorism had been revealed as domestic -- the cavalry arrived, flying a U.S. flag with the stripes running vertically instead of horizontally, one of the nicest visual grabs since Charlton Heston found the Statue of Liberty half-buried on the Planet of the Apes. Now that the power’s back on, the focus changes from survival to a post-9/11 fascism-as-freedom fable, the military junta as corporate takeover. Purest fantasy! (CBS, Tue., 10 p.m.)

-- Robert Lloyd