Slashdot has a story out on a fan uprising over the cancellation of the show "Jericho". Personally, I don't think the show is worth this level of fussing - it was ok, but no great shakes. Still - this leaves CBS with something of a dilemma:

"After presenting 'Jericho' fans with a cliffhanging season finale, CBS promptly cancelled the program. The shocked fans quickly banded together, many using CBS' own public "Jericho" discussion forum, and began brainstorming on ways to convince the network to bring back the show for a second season. A plot point in the final episode of "Jericho" involving the expletive "Nuts!" (in reference to an historic conversation between generals) was turned into a campaign to send large quantities of nuts to CBS' NY, LA, and affiliate offices. Fans have sent a total of $26,000 for a pooled campaign hosted at Nuts Online to ship over 19,000 pounds of peanuts to CBS. Other efforts acquired over $9,000 to publish full page advertisements in Variety (National Edition) and The Hollywood Reporter for Tuesday, May 29th. This is expected to become the largest ever fan campaign to bring a television show back from cancellation."

The question for CBS is this: do they actually have a large body of interested fans, or simply a committed base? The former would justify bringing the show back, the latter probably not. If CBS' model allowed for less expensive show production, they could bring it back in a narrowcast only mode - but I suspect they can't easily do that.

This sort of campaign is only going to become more common - the net makes it very easy for the committed few to look like the committed many. The hard part for outfits like CBS is that their production model doesn't make it easy to create content for a solid - but relatively small - core audience.

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