A reluctant hero of 'Jericho'

HOLLYWOOD - The fictional Kansas town of

Jericho

is freezing. There is no electricity, food supplies are dwindling, and no wild animals are to be found. People are dying. The new mayor has a plan: Stretch resources by forcing out refugees from nearby towns. He throws tear gas into a church and out run the refugees, tripping over one another on the steps. One woman lands at the bottom, face-down.

"Eat her!" yells Skeet Ulrich, who plays Jake Green, lead character in the drama (8 tonight on CBS3).

Everyone laughs. The line is not in the script and is definitely not something the complicated hero would say. But after developing his character and thinking about the show that has put him back in the spotlight after a self-imposed period away from Hollywood, it's nice for Ulrich to have a moment of levity once in a while.

Jake Green is what executive producer Carol Barbee calls a "reluctant hero," a guy with a checkered past who has returned to his hometown, after a five-year absence, on the eve of a multicity nuclear attack in the United States. He has enormous guilt over past acts - the audience isn't privy to what those are - and Jake winds up taking charge in the aftermath.

"Though he's lovely and friendly and sane - and we don't take these things for granted when we're dealing with stars - Skeet also is a person who doesn't give it all away," Barbee said. "He's not one of those actors who sort of tap-dances for attention. He's a man who keeps his own counsel and is respectful, but there's a mystery about him, which is also who Jake is. Jake has this great quality about him that says: 'I could save the world ... do I have to? OK, I will.' "

From the moment he signed on to lead what turned out to be one of the television season's few new hits, Ulrich became a collaborator on the project. He spends plenty of time on the Web researching nuclear weapons and attacks, watching documentaries about how different communities have survived all types of disasters, and is reading Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.

Ulrich never memorizes lines. Instead, he reads a script over and over until he senses that he's captured the context and the overall story. Then, when it comes time to film, the words just come to him. "I feel like if I have to sit down and learn the lines, then I'm not really involved in the story in my head for some reason," Ulrich said.

His method of absorbing the entire script offers another bonus, Barbee said. "It's a little rarer for an actor to get the God's-eye view of the whole thing and realize what part they play in the bigger story and make sure they are giving us what we need and getting us to where we need to go," she said.