Local fan’s nutty SOS campaign pays off for ‘Jericho’

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Shaun Daily is nuts about “Jericho”!

What a nutty idea!

CBS shells out for more episodes!

Horrible legume-related puns like those have been appearing in some of the country’s biggest newspapers and magazines since June, when a fan campaign led by Daily, a Las Vegas talk-radio host, caused CBS to rethink its cancellation and order a shortened second season of “Jericho” (10 p.m. Tuesday, KLAS-TV, Channel 8).

On May 10, the day after the season finale of the post-apocalyptic drama — the series follows the residents of Jericho, Kan., who are cut off from the rest of the world after a series of devastating nuclear attacks — Daily was commiserating with fellow “Jericho” fans on his Blog Talk Radio show (www.blogtalkradio.com). There were rumblings that, despite its medium-sized-but-rabid fan base, the series wouldn’t see a second season. Then inspiration struck.

Daily remembered the scene in the finale in which Jericho leader Jake Green (Skeet Ulrich) refused to give in to armed invaders from a nearby town by quoting Gen. Anthony McAuliffe’s famous response to a German surrender request: “Nuts!”

“I said, ‘Why don’t we send CBS a bunch of nuts and let them know it’s for “Jericho”? Send them something to get their attention.’ ”

Save-our-show campaigns usually have no trouble attracting attention, but they rarely actually save a show.

Fans of The WB’s “Roswell” bought more time for the sci-fi series by sending the network thousands of bottles of Tabasco — the show’s aliens couldn’t eat enough of it — but it was only in danger of cancellation at the time.

CBS, though, had a history of listening to passionate fans, having revived “Cagney & Lacey,” “Designing Women” and “The Magnificent Seven” after successful campaigns.

Word of Daily’s idea soon spread online, and peanuts started trickling in to CBS offices. “The following week when they canceled the show,” he says, “the campaign just took off like a rocket after that. People were just furious that CBS canceled it.”

Daily says fans who couldn’t afford a big bag would drop a single peanut in an envelope or have their kids draw a picture of a peanut and mail that in.

Eventually, close to 60,000 pounds of peanuts were delivered to CBS offices in New York and Los Angeles. “I didn’t think it would be as huge as it turned out to be,” Daily says. “It took on a life of its own.”

On June 6, less than a month after Daily had his “nutty idea,” CBS Entertainment President Nina Tassler credited the campaign’s “impressive and probably unprecedented display of passion” in announcing there would be seven new episodes of “Jericho” that, depending on the ratings, could lead to a full third season.

Thanks to the peanuts stunt, fans of USA’s “The 4400” are bombarding the cable channel with sunflower seeds — the favorite snack of one of the show’s characters — in hopes the sci-fi series also can be resurrected. (There’s no truth to the rumor that Hollywood is one good raisin-centric campaign away from recouping its strike losses by selling a new line of trail mix. But if Tassler is smart, she’ll cancel a couple of “CSIs” just as soon as they prominently feature Rolexes and Johnnie Walker Blue.)

Fans of NBC’s all-but-dead “Journeyman” have gotten into the act as well by sending the network boxes of “Rice-A-Roni,” a reference to the show’s San Francisco setting. Daily says he’s involved in that one, too, despite sounding a little bitter because his idea — mailing bottles of aspirin, because the main character gets headaches during each of his leaps through time — was “overruled.”

Daily also says he came up with the idea of supporting striking writers by sending pencils — more than 650,000 of them in all — to the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers.

“The ‘Battlestar Galactica’ fans are trying to get me to come up with some kind of campaign to save ‘Galactica,’ ” he adds, “and I’m, like, ‘Oh no!’ “

His role as “Jericho’s” savior has made Daily a sort of folk hero on the Internet. When ulcers hospitalized him in December, fan sites treated the news as though a head of state had fallen ill. And another campaign was launched — this time, for fans to send Daily postcards.

But as a fan himself, he downplays his role in changing the TV landscape.

“I just happened to come up with the right word at the right moment.”

Getting real: O.J. Simpson’s Jan. 11 booking at the Clark County Detention Center will be the focus of this week’s episode of “Jail” (9 p.m. Tuesday, KVMY-TV, Channel 21).

Christopher Lawrence’s Life on the Couch column appears on Mondays. E-mail him at clawrence@reviewjournal.com.