CBS has announced the summer rerun schedule that will precede the return of Jericho:

On Friday, July 6 at 9 p.m. ET, CBS will reair the original “Jericho” pilot, in which the residents of a small Kansas town begin to deal with the effects of a nuclear attack. The following week, at 8 p.m., the network will air a clipshow recapping the season’s first 11 episodes, followed by episode 12, “The Day Before,” which began the show’s spring season.

Through the rest of the summer, CBS will use the Friday 9 p.m. time slot to show episodes 13-22. CBS will concentrate on those particular episodes because they represent the second half of the show’s first season, the block of episodes that followed the show’s extended winter hiatus and suffered major viewer attrition against FOX’s “American Idol.”

Obviously, the hope is to get new viewers (and/or viewers who abandoned the show after the hiatus) invested in Jericho before the seven new episodes air. Hopefully, that’ll work. If it doesn’t, though, and the show is re-cancelled after those seven episodes, the “nutty” campaign to resurrect Jericho will have ended up resulting in CBS airing almost twice as many hours of reruns (13) as of new material (7).

Anyway, my advice to viewers who lost interest in the first half-season is: Give it a chance. The show markedly improved in the second half of the season, even as it lost viewership. It went from being decidedly uneven, with an overabundance of cringe-worthy moments, to being actually quite good, packing a genuine emotional punch and really being quite riveting at times. It’s hardly a perfect show, but it’s worth watching, IMHO.