When he gets to his parents' home, old wounds open and his father, Johnston Green (McRaney), is unforgiving of his wayward son. Jake goes with his mother, Gail (Reed), to visit his grandfather's grave and then says goodbye to her.

While Jake heads for parts unknown, a presidential speech is being broadcast on television. Suddenly the television signal goes out. On the horizon, there's an unmistakable mushroom cloud. Something's happened in Denver. As the town begins to react, a school bus filled with young children is returning from a field trip. A deer runs in front of the bus' wheels, and the bus crashes.

Jake is driving along and sees the mushroom cloud. Another car coming from the other direction hits Jake's car head-on. When Jake comes to, he's pretty banged up. There are no other cars or houses in sight, and the two people in the other car are dead. Jake begins to walk back toward Jericho.

In the town, Johnston, who is the mayor of Jericho, is trying to figure out what course of action the town needs to take. There's no communication outside the town, and people are starting to panic. When he finds out about the missing school bus, he sends the police out to look for both the bus and Jake.

Meanwhile, Jake is making his way back to town when two children run up to him and take him to the school bus. The bus driver is unconscious, and their teacher is injured. Worse yet, one of the children is having trouble breathing. As Jake tries to figure out how to help her and get the children to safety, the townsfolk in Jericho are beginning to turn on each other. Johnston is trying to keep people calm, but they're scared and no one knows what tomorrow will bring. Regardless of what they discover about what happened outside of Jericho, the townsfolk know their lives are forever changed.

Our worst fears realized

CBS's new drama Jericho explores our worst fears in a very real way. It's a compelling idea that's well executed and well acted. Despite that, it's impossible to judge this one episode and how it reflects on the series, because the pilot is about the event of seeing a nuclear explosion on the horizon, and the series will be about the aftermath.

Jericho's pilot lays out life in a small town in a nice, folksy way. The stark change after the mushroom cloud appears is well written, and the turns in the story are believable. However, while the story works, some of the characters seem to be tossed in, as if there had to be a quick introduction before they were shuffled off the screen.

Actor Skeet Ulrich as Jake Green is excellent, as he was in the edgy Miracles, and he has good chemistry with Gerald McRaney as Jake's father and the mayor of Jericho. And while the rest of the large cast looks more than capable, they aren't memorable because the pilot is busy laying out the setup and making sure we get to know Jake and Johnston.

While there's potential here, the pilot doesn't give us any idea how this series will proceed. The producers have promised in interviews there will be humor and that they won't focus on terrifying us each week. They also say there will be a mythology involving what's happened outside of Jericho that will build as the series continues. That's good news, because the thought of visiting Jericho each week if it had nothing but grim things to say about the nature of mankind would be just too depressing for words.

The pilot is certainly well crafted and offers some possibilities for poignant commentary on the state of the world. But the producers have some work to do before they'll be able to draw an audience on a consistent basis. They need to flesh out the characters quickly and let us embrace their plight without scaring us to death.