A small town comes to a standstill when cell phones black out and a mushroom cloud blossoms in the horizon. Cops scurry to find old giger counters wondering what happened. Thus Jericho begins it’s eerily realistic painting of a near-apocalyptic society.

Chaos ensues as a school bus goes missing, the people of Jericho can’t get in contact with the outside world and finally, over-taxed powerlines shut off leaving the small town literally in the dark. The darkest moment in the show had to be the teen replaying a message from his parents saying that they would remain in the city an extra day, then “what’s that” followed by the sound of a bomb and shattering glass before a cut off dial tone.

The most frightening moment is when that same teen shares the tape with other towns people. His neighbor hugs him, lending him a shoulder to cry on “I didn’t know they were in Denver.”

“They weren’t in Denver. They were in Atlanta.”

The next episodes are a nightmare’s blur: A young woman who didn’t see the explosion and is driving at night stops her strangely bumpy ride to discover hundreds of dead birds all over the ground. A cop from St. Lois knows a bit too much about nuclear bombs and spends hours creating a false identity for his family. The town tries to survive the first rainfall of nuclear fallout realizing that no one prepared for this. A staticky television broadcast comes through showing a Mandarin speaker and a map of the US with several radial circles. Scattered reports of tanks are filtered to the town folk. A black box from one of the hundreds of planes that were up in the air during the incident holds conversations between pilots discussing their options on emergency landings and witnessing fighter jets fly by them.

The show is horrifying, mysterious, character focused and poignant.