'Jericho' Fans Did More Than Enough, Producer Says

"I think our fans have been amazing," Barbee recently told Matt Webb Mitovich of TV Guide. "Our fans are not professional marketers. They are people with lives who gave so much of their time and energy and money to keep us on the air. They did more than enough, more than their share. We could not be more grateful to them. There's a limit to what a fan base can do when you're trying to reverse a slide in ratings."

Barbee said she had a 24-hour head start to inform the cast and crew about the cancellation before it was announced publicly on Friday, and she was assured by CBS that they were measuring "Jericho's" audience much differently than they did in the first season after it was cancelled for the first time.

"Even though we added a couple million viewers when you added those [timeshifted and online] numbers in, it looks to me like we're not in a network world where those numbers make dollars sense," Barbee said. "The legacy of 'Jericho' first of all will be the nuts campaign and this amazing fan revolt, but also that we are not at a moment in time where the networks realize they have to start counting people on the Internet."

There is a small chance that a cable channel could be interested in continuing "Jericho," but doing that would mean a significant reduction in budget, something that was already difficult to do with less money in the second season, Barbee said.

"We might be able to get it a little lower, depending on where we are shooting," she said of the production budget. "I would imagine, though, that people would be thrilled to get our audience. We had 8 million for our premiere, and even if we retained 3 [million] or 4 million for a cable station, that'd be a good audience. I'm hoping these talks work out, but you never know."

"Jericho" airs its series finale Tuesday at 10 p.m. ET on CBS.

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