TV Tyrant

A Jericho-fan friend e-mailed me yesterday with the great news — a Jericho feature film is in development by Jon Turtletaub’s production company, according to an interview with Turtletaub in iF Magazine..

Turtletaub, of course, was an executive producer/director on our favorite post-apocalyptic wrongly canceled TV show.

That means we might see these gentlemen together again, but this time on the big screen:

I’d pay $12 for that.

He said the cast would definitely return for it if it gets the big green light, and whatever the budget was, it would be bigger than the show had, so they could do wonders with it. Turtletaub told iF:

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.

Sounds fan-frakkin’-tastic.

Re-runs are being shown on The CW on Sunday nights these days, and Turtletaub pointed out that those airings get more viewers than Mad Men, the critically acclaimed AMC show. He says that not to take away from Mad Men, which he called “brilliant,” but rather to point out the difference in expectations for ratings between cable and broadcast.

Turtletaub has a new horror/mystery series, Harper’s Island, which is set to premiere April 9 on CBS. It’s described thusly:

Scream meets 10 Little Indians. The central plot is a murder mystery. Friends and family attending a wedding celebration on a secluded island off the coast of Seattle begin dying one by one. The island was the scene of a famous murder 7 years prior.

I just might watch that, too. It’s different, at least. And Turtletaub’s work on Jericho earned some loyalty from me, even if CBS hasn’t.