The Day After, a dramatization of the effects of a hypothetical nuclear attack on the United States was one of the biggest media events of the 1980s. Programmed by ABC on Sunday, 20 November 1983, The Day After was watched by an estimated half the adult population, the largest audience for a made-for-TV movie to that time. The movie was broadcast after weeks of advance publicity, fueled by White House nervousness about its anti-nuclear "bias". ABC had distributed a half-million "viewer's guides" and discussion groups were organized around the country. A studio discussion, in which Secretary of State took part, was conducted following the program. The advance publicity was unprecedented in scale. It centered on the slogan "THE DAY AFTER--Beyond Imagining. The starkly realistic drama of nuclear confrontation and its devastating effect on a group of average American citizens..."

The brainchild of Brandon Stoddard, then president of ABC Motion Picture Division, who had been impressed by the theatrical film The China Syndrome. Directed by Nicholas Meyer, a feature film director, The Day After went on to be either broadcast or released as a theatrical feature in over 40 countries. In Britain, for example, an edited version was shown three weeks later, on the ITV commercial network, and accompanied by a Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament recruitment drive. It was critically dismissed as a typically tasteless American travesty of the major theme--in a country which had yet to transmit Peter Watkins' film on the same theme, The War Game.

Wherever it was shown, The Day After raised questions about genre--was it drama-documentary, faction (how do you depict a catastrophe that has not yet happened?) or disaster movie? It could be seen as stretching the medium, in the lineage of Roots and Holocaust, manipulating a variety of prestige TV and film propaganda devices to raise itself above the ratings war and the attempt to address a notional universal audience about the twentieth century nightmare.

ABC defined the production both in terms of realism--for example, the special effects to do with the missiles and blast were backed up with rosters of scientific advisors--and of art, as a surrealist vision of the destruction of western civilization--as miniaturized in a mid-West town and a nuclear family (graphically represented in the movie poster). Network executives were particularly sensitive to the issue of taste and the impact of horror on sensitive viewers (they knew that Watkins' film had been deemed "too horrifying for the medium of television"), although, contradictorily, the majority of the audience was supposed to be already inured to the depiction of suffering. The delicate issue of identification with victims and survivors was handled by setting the catastrophe in a real town with ICBM silos and by using a large cast of relatively unknown actors (though John Lithgow, playing a scientist, would become more famous) and a horde of extras, constellated around the venerable Jason Robards as a doctor. Time magazine opined that "much of the power came from the quasi-documentary idea that nuclear destruction had been visited upon the real town of Lawrence, Kansas, rather than upon some back lot of Warner Brothers." Scriptwriter Edward Hume decided to fudge the World War III scenario: "It's not about politics or politicians or military decision-makers. It is simply about you and me--doctors, farmers, teachers, students, brothers and kid sisters engaged in the usual love and labor of life in the month of September." (This populist dimension was reinforced when the mayor of Lawrence, Kansas sent a telegram to Soviet leader Andropov.)

There is an American pastoralism at work in the depiction of prairie life. The director Nicholas Meyer (Star Trek II) was aware of the danger of lapsing into formulae, and wrote in a "production diary" for TV Guide: "The more The Day After resembles a film, the less effective it is likely to be. No TV stars. What we don't want is another Hollywood disaster movie with viewers waiting to see Shelley Winters succumb to radiation poisoning. To my surprise, ABC agrees. Their sole proviso: one star to help sell the film as a feature oversees. Fair enough." Production proceeded without the cooperation of the Defense Department, which had wanted the script to make it clear the Soviets started the war. Despite sequences of verite and occasional trappings of actuality, the plot develops in soap opera fashion, with two families about to be united by marriage. But it evolves to an image of a community that survives the nuclear family, centered on what is left of the local university and based on the model of a medieval monastery. Although November was sweeps month, there were to be no commercial breaks after the bomb fell. Even so, its critics assimilated the film to the category of made-for-TV treatment of sensational themes. Complained a New York Times editorial: "A hundred million Americans were summoned to be empathetically incinerated, and left on the true day after without a single idea to chew upon." Other critics found it too tame in its depiction of the effects of nuclear attack (abroad, this was sometimes attributed to American naivete about war)--a reproach anticipated in the final caption "The catastrophic events you have witnessed are, in all likelihood, less severe than the destruction that would actually occur in the event of a full nuclear strike against the United States". And some critics appreciated its aesthetic ambitions, which included a self-reflexive moment about inserting yourself into a Chinese landscape painting. Not since then has the hybrid between entertainment and information, between a popular genre like disaster, and the address to the enlightened citizen, been as successfully attempted by a network in a single media event.

-Susan Emmanuel

CAST

Dr. Russell Oakes............................. Jason Robards Nancy Bauer................................... JoBeth Williams Stephen Klein ................................Steve Guttenberg Jim Dahlberg........................................ John Cullum Joe Huxley ...........................................John Lithgow Eve Dahlberg.......................................... Bibi Beach Denise Dahlberg ......................................Lori Lethin Alison Ransom................................... Amy Madigan Bruce Gallatin............................................ Jeff East Helen Oakes............................... Georgann Johnson Airman McCoy ...........................William Allen Young Dr. Sam Hachiya.................................... Calvin Jung Dr. Austin ............................................Lin McCarthy Reverend Walker........................... Dennis Lipscomb Dennis Hendry....................................... Clayton Day Danny Dahlberg...................................... Doug Scott Jolene Dahlberg.................................. Ellen Anthony Marilyn Oakes........................................ Kyle Aletter Cynthia.............................................. Alston Ahearn Professor............................................ William Allyn Ellen Hendry .....................................Antonie Becker Nurse................................................ Pamela Brown Julian French................................... Jonathan Estrin Aldo.................................................. Stephen Furst Tom Cooper........................................ Arliss Howard Dr. Wallenberg.............................. Rosanna Huffman Cleo Mackey .........................................Barbara Iley TV Host.......................................... Madison Mason Cody..................................................... Bob Meister Mack........................................... Vahan Moosekian Dr. Landowska ....................................George Petrie 2nd Barber........................................ Glenn Robards 1st Barber........................................... Tom Spratley Vinnie Conrad .......................................Stan Wilson

PRODUCERS

Robert Papazian, Stephanie Austin

PROGRAMMING HISTORY

ABC
20 November 1983                                    8:00-10:35

FURTHER READING

Boyd-Bowman, Susan, "The Day After: Representations of the Nuclear Holocaust." Screen (London), July-October 1984.