![]() The huge audience for “The Day After” – second only to the “MASH” finale earlier that year among entertainment programs (thus excluding Super Bowls) – reached the country and influenced public opinion in ways that seem almost unimaginable in a streaming age characterized by an abundance of content and the fragmented viewing that goes with it. The network followed the movie with a special broadcast of a news program hosted by Ted Koppel, “Viewpoint,” addressing the anxieties that the movie reflected – and provoked. According to Nielsen research, 46% of all US homes tuned in. Still, the ABC presentation brought the horror directly into living rooms on a mass scale. It premiered the same year as the movies “WarGames,” which dealt with a nuclear threat caused by artificial intelligence and “Testament,” a quietly devastating PBS production that also played in theaters. In an interview for the Television Academy’s Archives of American Television, Stoddard, who died in 2014, recalled that advertisers were “terrified to be in the movie,” which carried only 12 minutes of commercials, and went ad-free the last 45 minutes when the bombs fell. ![]() “The Day After” was the brainchild of then-ABC Entertainment chief Brandon Stoddard, inspired in part by the 1979 movie “The China Syndrome,” which imagined a possible meltdown at a nuclear plant – and received a real-life boost from an unsettling episode at the Three Mile Island facility weeks after the film opened. The dialogue between the administration and ABC executives included reports President Ronald Reagan asked ABC’s chairman, Leonard Goldenson, to “bury the movie” over a game of golf. That made-for-TV film, “The Day After,” not only served as a highwater mark for the genre but almost surely contributed to hastening the end of the Cold War.Įven before the movie aired, the subject matter alarmed the Reagan White House, which feared the depiction of a nuclear strike and its effects on a group of people in Kansas might shake America’s resolve and potentially cause panic. On November 20, 1983, a record audience estimated at more than 100 million Americans assembled in a very different TV era to watch a “What if?” movie about nuclear annihilation.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |