Peanut Mountain: How the battle of "Jericho" was won

Plus — a spoiler exclusive to TV Barn (we think)!

CBS entertainment chief Nina Tassler (pictured) told TV critics here in L.A. that there was "no single reason" why she and her team finally decided to reverse themselves and bring back “Jericho” for a second, shortened season.

But certainly, the guy at the camera shop had something to do with it.

Tassler was at her neighborhood camera store (do they still have those?) and an employee was processing her order, looked at her credit card and said, “Jericho!” And then: “I sent you an email.”

Tassler said she was at the doctor's office when she received her next sign. She hadn't seen this doctor before, so when he came into the office to give the results of her checkup, his look made her nervous. “Oh, god, I think there's going to be bad news,” she recalled. “He pulls out a bag of peanuts.”

Great stories. Still, there have been many fan campaigns over the years, many of them every bit as intense as the campaign to save “Jericho,” and almost none of them succeeded. Furthermore, only 8 million Americans were watching "Jericho" at the end, a decline of more than one-third of the audience the show had in the fall. Why the change of mind?

Tassler explained to me afterward that by Memorial Day weekend, the fan response — much of it personal, passionate and polite — had crescendoed in her mailbox and, crucially, at the Jericho Web site at CBS.com. The campaign, an obvious result of what we now call “social networking,” triggered conversations between herself and other CBS executives about the role that a user community can have in the promotion of a TV show.

Later that week in Las Vegas, where the annual CBS affiliates meeting was being held, Tassler met with key  executives, including CBS research guru David Poltrack and the always-excited head of digital, Quincy Smith. The collective wisdom of the room was that something different was happening here; but more than that, the time in which it was happening was unlike any in television history. There were two new Nielsen numbers never before compiled — DVR usage and commercial viewing — and both would eventually show that "Jericho" was one of the network's most impressive performers. There was video streaming at Innertube on CBS.com, which admittedly was not huge, but "Jericho" was the second most-streamed CBS show on the site.

Above all, there was the sense that somehow this passion could be converted into higher total viewership for "Jericho," on TV and the Web. When I told Tassler and Chris Ender, the CBS Corp. senior VP for communications, about receiving a series of emails in recent days from "Jericho" fans asking for updates, and that none of them was a form letter but that each one followed a specific set of talking points and was friendly and polite, they both jumped in and said, "Yes!" They've gotten thousands of such letters in the weeks since the upfronts.

So the feeling was, it was worth an expenditure of $20 million to produce and promote a half-season of “Jericho” to see if it could benefit from social networking and the rapid deployment of new technologies (broadband use went up by 10 million homes and DVR penetration jumped from 18 percent to 20 percent — just in the last six months). For all that, Nina Tassler's letter to “Jericho” fans, posted to the show's bulletin board June 6, struck an old-fashioned chord. “A loyal and passionate community has clearly formed around the show,” wrote Tassler. “But that community needs to grow.”

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Interestingly, the newest Nielsen metric played no part in the decision to renew “Jericho.” I am referring to the measurement of commercial viewing on a live-plus-3-day basis, a metric that CBS eggheads have decided should be called C3 (as opposed to my man C4 at WBAL radio). Simply put, C3 is the ratings for the ads only, not the show. And it's measured accurately because it uses DVRs, which record — with the user's permission, of course — exactly how long you see a commercial, whether you've fast forwarded over it, watched some of it, watched most of it, etc. By using C3, which advertisers and networks have agreed to do next season, there will be better accountability than ever that ads are, in fact, being watched.

The first comprehensive C3 ratings ever compiled by Nielsen were released two days before “Jericho” was renewed.  And whaddya know — “Jericho” had the highest overperformance of any CBS show in its C3 rating. That is to say, “Jericho’s” commercials scored a rating 1 percent higher than the overall program rating. (How exactly that happens — what, people tune out when the show comes back on?? — is a question we must save for another day.) It was the No. 9 show in terms of audience gains of all shows on TV. (“The Office,” which is also the most DVR'd show on television, topped the C3 rankings as well.)

I thought, there has to be a connection between “Jericho’s” hefty C3 and the decision to renew!  But turns out, there isn't.  Tassler was adamant on this point in and after the press conference. “I sat in the room, and we talked.  We did not discuss the commercial ratings at that particular moment as it pertained to 'Jericho.' It didn't come up.  I'm telling you the truth.”

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And now, the moment you've been waiting for — a season two “Jericho” spoiler, straight from Tassler (including a detail not revealed in the press conference). I've set it in white type so you can't see it unless you highlight the space below this line:

In the first episode of "Jericho" next season, Mimi proposes to Stanley.