JERICHO' PRODUCERS DAN SHOTZ and JON STEINBERG TALK ABOUT THE END AND PERHAPS A NEW BEGINNING

By now, everyone knows the story. CBS puts one of the best genre shows on television last year called JERICHO. Fans love it, it gets cancelled, fans convince CBS to bring it back for a 7-episode Season Two, where it’s, well, cancelled again.

It’s frustrating to watch such a great series walk off into the sunset, without getting the final word from its creative team and creator/producer Jon Steinberg and Co-Executive producer Dan Shotz spoke with iF this week about the end, the beginning and when we might actually see that alternate JERICHO Season Two ending.

iF MAGAZINE: While I loved the enormity of the seven-episode season, it felt at times like things were going by way too fast. The last episode in particular, it felt like the time lines of Jake and Hawkins were moving at three times the speed as the same events in Jericho. I’m curious, from the writing perspective, were the scripts for the seven episodes too long, and then pared back to the core essentials? And what other concessions had to be made to accelerate the time lines of all the different stories?

JON STEINBERG: I don’t really think the writing process or the scripts were significantly different than they were in Season One. There were some practical issues that changed -- i.e., there were generally fewer scenes written for Season Two than for Season One. By the time the editing process was finished, most of those differences became pretty much meaningless. Our goal was to make sure that the budgetary and schedule limitations didn’t affect the quality of the storytelling, so hopefully we were reasonably successful in that regard.

iF: That said, were the episodes that were filmed longer than normal, because of all the material you had to get on screen? Will the DVD have tons of deleted scenes, or was shooting pretty lean and mean?

STEINBERG: The DVD’s will definitely have a bunch of deleted scenes included. And yes, we couldn’t really afford time-wise to shoot anything this season that wasn’t important and/or cool. So while those scenes might not have been absolutely indispensable in terms of telling the story they were a part of, they should definitely be interesting to watch after the fact.

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Source: IF Magazine