How The Day After Saved the World from Nuclear Annihilation – The Hollywood Reporter

Americans had a lot of choices about what to watch on television on the night of November 20, 1983.

On CBS, they can enjoy an evening of sitcoms, starting with AliceThen move on The Jeffersons And Good night, Beantownand finally concluded their prime-time viewing with an episode of “ Trapper John, MD

Over the dial on NBC, there was one part of Kennedya five-hour miniseries in which Martin Sheen used his thick, chowder-like Pahston accent to portray, for a change, a president not named Bartlet.

But most people – a staggering 100 million people – chose to tune in to the ABC, where they watched the end of the world.

After the moon landing, it’s hard to think of a television moment that had a greater impact on the collective psyche than… The next day, ABC’s drama The White Knuckle depicting the effects of a nuclear strike on the United States. It aired 40 years ago — which is being celebrated on December 4 with a new PBS documentary, TV eventIn addition to a recently published book about the film, Apocalypse TV – He didn’t just terrify the nation. It may also have changed the course of humanity’s fate, which at the time, at the height of the Cold War, seemed headed toward an inevitable atomic confrontation.

This is a historical focal point worth pausing on for a moment: the network that was cooked Love boat And three company, Which was presented to the world Donnie and Mary And Love the American wayMaybe save the planet from nuclear annihilation.

“I’ve come to believe that’s true,” says Nicholas Meyer, 77, who directed the three-hour film. The film may have actually helped prevent nuclear war. It definitely changed one person’s mind about it, and that person was the President of the United States. Ronald Reagan wrote about watching the film in his memoirs. His biographer, who spent three years in the White House, said the only time he saw Reagan flip-flop was after watching the movie. Ultimately, this sent Reagan into disarray, as he signed the INF Treaty, the only treaty that led to the physical dismantling of nuclear weapons.

Brains behind The next day, the person who deserves most of the credit for not only conceiving the concept but also arming a reluctant ABC to put it on the air, was the late Brandon Stoddard, who was then the network executive in charge of ABC’s made-for-TV movies. . Stoddard, who died aged 77 in 2014, had made a name for himself as a producer of 1970s films. the roots, one of the first television miniseries and a cultural event of its own. Presumably he got an idea The next day While watching China SyndromeMichael Douglas’s 1979 film about the near meltdown of a nuclear reactor, which, in a harrowing example of life imitating art, happened to be released before the actual Three Mile Island disaster.

“Brandon was blown away by Three Mile Island,” Meyer recalls. “And that’s how he came up with it The next day. “What if we showed a nuclear exchange and what would happen to ordinary people if they were exposed to nuclear weapons?”

Unsurprisingly, ABC’s top executives were not entirely on board with Stoddard’s vision. At the time, the network’s biggest hits were shows like happy Days And Kung Fu. The idea of ​​making a TV movie in which ordinary people were blown to pieces by a nuclear explosion seemed completely unacceptable.

But Stoddard was not persistent; He hired veteran television writer Edward Hume, who has written for programs such as Barnaby Jones And Streets of San Francisco, to group text together; Hume, who died earlier this year at the age of 87, exploited a story set in Lawrence, Kansas — the geographical center of the continental United States — that focused on how survivors of the nuclear exchange dealt with the aftermath of Armageddon.

Somehow, after much bargaining — Stoddard originally wanted a two-night event but settled on a one-night movie — the picture was put into production, with a cast including Jason Robards, John Lithgow, JoBeth Williams, and Steve Guttenberg. But even after filming was completed, it was an uphill battle to get ABC to put the film on the air.

For one thing, there has been significant political pushback. Conservative groups went on the warpath against the network, claiming that the film was Soviet propaganda aimed at undermining America’s nuclear deterrent (although Hume’s text never specified who launched the strike against the United States or why). On the other hand, the topic of atomic war was, predictably, radioactive for advertisers. They began to withdraw in large numbers.

“General Foods, General Motors, General Mills — all the generals headed for the hills,” Mayer recalls.

However, Stoddard continued to press and ABC’s higher-ups relented, vacating the November Sunday night show The next day, giving in to what they were so sure of would be a ratings disaster. After all, who in their right mind would want to watch a movie about the end of the world?

It turns out, of course, pretty much everyone.

“I was only five years old when the series came on TV,” recalls Jeff Daniels, the now 45-year-old program director. TV eventthe PBS documentary about The next day. “I watched my whole family in our basement in Queens. They were smart enough to put me to bed before the bombs started falling, but I was terrified anyway. “And that’s when my nightmares about nuclear war started.”

And not only him. The entire nation — or at least the 100 million people who watched the film, making it the most-watched television movie of all time — was traumatized. The White House switchboard lit up with calls from terrified citizens, while anti-nuclear activists launched the “Let Lawrence Live” movement. Ted Koppel devoted an entire news special to The next dayan all-star lineup of panelists — William F. Buckley, Carl Sagan, Henry Kissinger, Robert McNamara, and Elie Wiesel — line up to discuss American nuclear policy.

“There’s some good news, and you might need it now,” Koppel began the broadcast. “If you can, take a quick look out the window. It’s all still there…”

Ronald Reagan watched the film at Camp David and later that day wrote down his impressions in his diary. “Lawrence Kansas has been wiped out in a nuclear war,” he wrote. “It was done forcefully. It’s very effective and left me very depressed.” Four years later, in 1987, Reagan traveled to Reykjavik, Iceland, to settle the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev, which resulted in the dismantling of thousands of nuclear missiles.

And yet, despite all this, 40 years later, some things haven’t changed one bit. Recently, Meyer pitched a reboot of the film to a slew of streaming companies, updating the premise by showing the impact of the nuclear exchange across the globe, with plot lines set in different cities around the world.

“No one wanted to touch it,” he says. It was the same reaction Brandon got. “Who wants to watch a movie about nuclear war?”