The TV IV Blog

tags: tv movies, tv history, events

In November 1983, I was seven years old. I was in a school play at my private school about the life and works of Walt Disney, and I was playing Peter Pan. It was the first time I had ever acted in anything, but this story is not about being bitten by “the acting bug” as James Lipton would call it.

I remember after one performance (or maybe it was a rehearsal), my father said he was in a rush to get home. My father was the most charming, most sociable person I’ve ever known. It was simply unlike him to rush out of any social gathering, particularly one related to theater (he himself having been an actor who had once moved to LA to become a movie star). What could possibly have compelled him to zip past the comraderie of post-rehearsal off hours? Only a very urgent appointment, indeed.

The appointment, as I recall vividly, was meeting his friend Anna and her son Brian as the four of us (my brother and sister were far too young, and my mother must have been out of town, in school or working) watched the ABC movie of the week The Day After.

I was recently reminded of that night when I rewatched that movie. When I first saw it, at seven, it scared the living shit out of me. The images of people - a woman in an office, children on a playground, a groom and the bride he is kissing - being instantaneously vaporized into skeletons was burned into my memory for years afterwards, just as the shadows of people similarly vaporized were burned into the pavement at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For the remainder of the decade, I was terrified of the concept of a nuclear holocaust, and no assurances from my mother that my Indiana home would almost certainly not be a target in a nuclear war could assuage my fears of instantaneous, horrific Armageddon happening at the whim of Republican Administrations in whom my decidedly Democratic parents had instilled me with no faith. I was born in 1976, making me amongst the last of several generations to know the terror dripping from the phrases “mutually assured destruction” and “nuclear retaliation.” I invite my younger readers to try to imagine being a ten-year-old who seriously thinks about whether he would rather be at Ground Zero of a nuclear blast with no foreknowledge of its arrival; at Ground Zero with just enough foreknowledge to wish his friends and relatives farewell; or far enough away that he had several days to make amends and say good-byes, but would nonetheless be assured of death eventually. I remember having those thoughts at ten, and I can all but guarantee that others my age and a year or thirty older can recall having pondered similar questions. Those younger than me may note with curiosity when their “regularly scheduled programming” is interrupted “so that we may bring you this special report,” but they will never know the tight feeling of dread the special report theme song once instilled in our collective guts, the brief assurety we had that this one, this time, it would be Tom Brokaw or Dan Rather or Peter Jennings telling us all that the missiles were on their way, and our only hope now, to paraphrase what Mad Magazine once said, was to put our heads between our legs and kiss our butts good-bye.

One of my fellow TV IV Wiki admins is a young German man of only 19, and it seems bizarre to me that I should have much clearer memories of the most significant event in his country’s history of his lifetime than he does, but I do. I remember the release and wonder of waking up one November morning, mere days after my thirteenth birthday (six years almost to the day after I’d seen the woman in her Kansas City office vaporized by flame), to see hundreds of his countrymen joining hands atop a crumbling, graffiti-covered wall. I remember being old enough to realize the most terrible Sword of Damocles mankind had ever devised had just been removed from over the entire world’s head overnight. I remember thinking to myself that my nightmares of my mother, my father, my sister and brother and teachers and aunts and uncles and grandparents and friends being flash-burned into X-rays of skeletons and then nothing at all, or worse, dying days later of radiation poisoning, our hair and teeth falling out, our body covered in sores and bruises, our own intestines being expelled in our stool in a bloody mass, were now forever gone.

You kids today and your namby-pamby “War on Terrorism.” You don’t know how good you got it, by gum.

My first viewing of The Day After was my first experience with the threat of nuclear Armageddon, but it was not my last. Nonetheless, as the saying goes, “You always remember your first time,” and as such, it was a defining moment in my young life. However, in reviewing the Internet articles on The Day After, it would seem the ABC movie was a defining moment for others as well. According to some sources, The Day After broke the record for the highest-rated TV movie of all time. ABC followed its initial broadcast with a debate between Carl Sagan and William F. Buckley Jr. as to the comparative merits and threats of nuclear war, and it established a counselling hotline for viewers. Wikipedia says even President Ronald Reagan claimed to have been “deeply depressed” by the movie and later credited it with inspiring in part his signing of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 1987.

Seeing the film just a few days ago, I was struck by how horrible the acting - excluding that of Jason Robards and John Lithgow - was. This was a film in which a pre-Police Academy Steve Guttenberg had a major role, and his acting was no better before it consisted of Super Gluing a police commissioner’s hands to his head. The special effects were a bit on the crude side even by the standards of 1983 (we’d already had the first three Star Wars movies, the first three Superman movies, Alien, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Raiders of the Lost Ark - we weren’t completely in the Stone Age). Most of the characters had cardboard-thin personalities, and almost all of them spoke in the sort of sledge-hammer blunt pontifications and hackneyed monologues which only TV movie of the week writers would ever try to pass off as something a human being would ever say.

Yet the movie was still just as terrifying to me at thirty as it had been to me at seven. My friend Dawn, who was watching it with me but had been only two years old when it first aired, was so disturbed by the scenes of nuclear annihilation that she had to leave the room for a while. And seeing those images - edited together from stock footage as they were - reminded me of my childhood nightmares from a quarter century ago.

Yet, to me, the more important question it raised was: Shocking as it may be even today, would it have had the impact had it aired in 2007 as it did in 1983? Would it inspire debate and discussion, garner massive ratings, require switchboards and encourage treaties? Could any TV movie change the world as The Day After once did?

One of the more popular television shows in 2007, even on the TV IV Wiki, owes much to The Day After. Like its predecessor, Jericho is set in Kansas after the destruction of most of Western Civilization by the launching of nuclear missiles. Yet Jericho has inspired no such debate, no such treaties. Granted, Jericho’s acting is, if no worse, certainly no better than The Day After’s, and if any writing could be worse, Jericho certainly has that. Where The Day After at least made up for its ham-handedness with a certain degree of earnestness, Jericho is just plain dopey. It may be too much to ask of this Dawson’s Creek-with-mushroom-clouds to inspire anti-proliferation agreements.

So what of last year’s Emmy winner for Best Drama, 24? It has thrice now dealt with the threat of nuclear strikes, and it has also addressed other key issues of the day - anti-Islamic discrimination, pre-emptive strikes, torture as a means of intelligence gathering. Yet for all its quality and popularity, it cannot truly be said to have sparked real debate on any of those issues. The tempest in a teapot over its portrayal of Muslims in America provoked more discussion of the portrayal of Muslims in the media than of the issue itself. Politicians may sometimes reference Jack Bauer when promoting the occasional necessity of torture, but their pop culture references come across more as pandering than as a debate inspired by the show.

Perhaps no continuing TV series can have the political impact of a movie or miniseries. Episodic television is by nature too ethereal, too impermanent. The annihilation of a city on 24 or of many cities on Jericho is merely a plot development, a launching pad for next week’s episode, not its raison d’etre.

If it takes a movie or miniseries to change the world, then TV - or, at least, network TV - will almost certainly never again change the world as ABC did in 1983. The era of the TV movie and miniseries is long gone, and a “highly rated” movie of today is graded on a far different curve than it was in my childhood. Just as I remember my father hurrying me home to watch The Day After, I remember him having no compunction about telling others of the reason for his curtness that night, and I remember more than one person responding with words similar to, “Oh, that’s right! That’s tonight! I’d better get going, too!” In the MOTW’s heyday of the late 1960s through the late 1980s, The Day After was not alone in garnering this response. My friend Sue, a former Broadway actress, once told me, “Roots closed three Broadway shows, and I know because I was in one of them.” Interviews on the DVD version of Shogun describe major American cities - New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago - as being like ghost towns on the nights of the miniseries’ airing. It has been a long time since a TV movie has played as significant a role in a major directorial career as Duel once did for Steven Spielberg. If The Day After was the highest rated TV movie of all time when it aired, then surely one would have been hard-pressed to find a single TV set in America not tuned to its depiction of devastation, to find many Americans of adult years in 1983 who had not seen it.

But network MOTW’s have declined in popularity (and even quality - and they weren’t that great to begin with), and there’s just too much competition now. In 1983, cable existed, but there were only a handful of cable networks, and far fewer homes had cable than do today. There were three broadcast networks, and for almost all of primetime, they competed with each other and only with each other in captivating American audiences. Those few people who did not watch The Day After were most likely watching whatever was airing on CBS or NBC that night - not watching Comedy Central or surfing the Internet or a DVD rented from Netflix.

And those who watched The Day After all watched it at more or less the same time. VCR’s existed (in two formats), but, again, they were not nearly as popular as they would later be, and it was still unusual for people to record shows and watch them later rather than watch them live. I watched The Day After in the eastern time zone. At the exact moment I was watching it, other seven-year-old boys from Maine to Texas, from Chicago to Miami, were watching it at their father’s feet. We all saw those people transformed into X-ray images and then blinking out at the same time. As the closing credits - with their warning that the images portrayed were merely a cleaned-up-for-television depiction of the true horrors of nuclear war (and they most certainly were) - rolled, television sets in California, Washington and Oregon flipped on to see the opening credits for the west coast feed. For six hours in 1983, the nation was united by one set of images, shared in one experience, just as surely as it had with real-life images and experiences in November of 1963 and July of 1969 and August of 1974 and September of 2001.

Perhaps it was that synchronicity of experience which gave The Day After (and Roots and Shogun and Duel) its power. If so, it will almost certainly never again be repeated. September 11, 2001 will probably be the last time in history when almost all of America saw the exact same image at the exact same moment. And even though those iconic images of the second plane hitting, the smoking towers, the people leaping to their deaths, President Bush saying, “We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them,” even though the images we remember may be more or less identical, the source from which we got them on that day was not. Not one of those iconic images includes a Walter Cronkite wiping his eyes as he announces the death of President Kennedy, nor wiping his eyes again as he realizes a man - an American - is setting foot on an alien world for the first time. We may all remember where we were when we saw the second tower fall, but some of us will one day remember we saw it on network news, some on CNN, some on FOX News and some on the Internet. Even in our last simultaneous experience, the fractures had begun to show.

A quarter century after The Day After, six years after 9/11, our society is as fragmented as the charred remains of American Airlines Flight 77 in the Pentagon. It is frankly boring to trade “where were you when Kennedy died/the Challenger exploded/the towers fell” stories, because they all sound the same. “We came back from recess, and our teacher flipped on the TV.” “I came home from school, and my mother was sitting in front of the TV crying.” “I was in bed asleep, and my friend called me and said, ‘Dude, flip on the TV right now.’” When the next President Kennedy is shot, the next Challenger explodes, the next 9/11 happens, I wonder if those stories will all sound so remarkably similar. Perhaps it already has, and it isn’t. No one image from Hurricane Katrina is as iconic as that of the smoking World Trade Center, because there were so many ways to experience and internalize those events. Where were you when you heard New Orleans was drowning? Do you even recall? Was it anywhere like where I was?

Similarly, for as many people who may watch any given episode of Lost or Heroes or Grey’s Anatomy, perhaps very few of them will see it at the same time by the same means. Thanks to TiVo, I watch almost no television live anymore - in the last year, I can claim to have seen only the Super Bowl, the last two hours of the Oscars, the first hour of the SAG Awards and about half the episodes of this season of 24 live. Everything else I have seen - and there has been a considerable amount - I have watched as late as a month later. Others may have seen the same show days earlier through streaming video or on their iPods, others a few days later still through bit torrents, others only a day or three later when it was rebroadcast on the network’s cable sister station, while still more will have seen that show many months later when it will have been released on a DVD boxed set. Perhaps only a fraction of those Americans who will one day be able to claim to have seen the series finale of Lost will have seen it together.

For TV movies and miniseries, this fragmentation is even more pronounced. As a nation, we are still generally accustomed to watching episodes of TV shows on networks in timeslots. But even with the more popular TV movies and miniseries of the last decade - the Band of Brotherses, for instance - the format has been dominated by cable, particularly premium cable. It is surely a small percentage of HBO miniseries or original movie viewers who see the program during its premiere. With rebroadcasts, they don’t really need to make the effort, even if they don’t have a DVR or iPod. And for the many Americans who don’t have HBO at all, Netflix, Blockbuster and Amazon will fill them in eventually.

Don’t get me wrong. I love watching TV in 2007; I really do. The technology has made my television watching experience more enjoyable, and I frankly feel the overall quality of television (or at least the overall quality of quality television) is higher than at any other point in my lifetime - perhaps in history.

But this quality does not diminish the sad fact that our ability to be united as a nation and as a culture by a single image or set of images - be they real or fictional, horrific or inspiring - shared simultaneously is gone. A low-budget movie will probably never again require a counselling hotline. Perhaps no Broadway show will ever need fear for its box office because of a Roots or The Day After; no metropolitan streets emptied by one broadcast. The closest we come now to a shared experience is American Idol, the Super Bowl, the World Series and the Academy Awards, and let’s face it - they aren’t all that popular. We may have more and better entertainment and information, but our shared American experience is broken, and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men can’t put it together again.

Like the Cold War and 9/11, it’s all history now.