{"id":112573,"date":"2020-11-15T23:10:25","date_gmt":"2020-11-15T20:10:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/watch-television-event-review-a-documentary-looks-back-at-the-day-after\/"},"modified":"2020-11-15T23:10:25","modified_gmt":"2020-11-15T20:10:25","slug":"watch-television-event-review-a-documentary-looks-back-at-the-day-after","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/watch-television-event-review-a-documentary-looks-back-at-the-day-after\/","title":{"rendered":"Watch &#8216;Television Event&#8217; Review: A Documentary Looks Back at &#8216;The Day After&#8217;"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"ez-toc-container\" class=\"ez-toc-v2_0_85 counter-hierarchy ez-toc-counter ez-toc-custom ez-toc-container-direction\">\n<p class=\"ez-toc-title\" style=\"cursor:inherit\">Table of Contents<\/p>\n<label for=\"ez-toc-cssicon-toggle-item-6a408d246f55f\" class=\"ez-toc-cssicon-toggle-label\"><span class=\"\"><span class=\"eztoc-hide\" style=\"display:none;\">Toggle<\/span><span class=\"ez-toc-icon-toggle-span\"><svg style=\"fill: #dd3333;color:#dd3333\" xmlns=\"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/2000\/svg\" class=\"list-377408\" width=\"20px\" height=\"20px\" viewBox=\"0 0 24 24\" fill=\"none\"><path d=\"M6 6H4v2h2V6zm14 0H8v2h12V6zM4 11h2v2H4v-2zm16 0H8v2h12v-2zM4 16h2v2H4v-2zm16 0H8v2h12v-2z\" fill=\"currentColor\"><\/path><\/svg><svg style=\"fill: #dd3333;color:#dd3333\" class=\"arrow-unsorted-368013\" xmlns=\"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/2000\/svg\" width=\"10px\" height=\"10px\" viewBox=\"0 0 24 24\" version=\"1.2\" baseProfile=\"tiny\"><path d=\"M18.2 9.3l-6.2-6.3-6.2 6.3c-.2.2-.3.4-.3.7s.1.5.3.7c.2.2.4.3.7.3h11c.3 0 .5-.1.7-.3.2-.2.3-.5.3-.7s-.1-.5-.3-.7zM5.8 14.7l6.2 6.3 6.2-6.3c.2-.2.3-.5.3-.7s-.1-.5-.3-.7c-.2-.2-.4-.3-.7-.3h-11c-.3 0-.5.1-.7.3-.2.2-.3.5-.3.7s.1.5.3.7z\"\/><\/svg><\/span><\/span><\/label><input type=\"checkbox\"  id=\"ez-toc-cssicon-toggle-item-6a408d246f55f\" checked aria-label=\"Toggle\" \/><nav><ul class='ez-toc-list ez-toc-list-level-1 ' ><li class='ez-toc-page-1 ez-toc-heading-level-2'><a class=\"ez-toc-link ez-toc-heading-1\" href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/watch-television-event-review-a-documentary-looks-back-at-the-day-after\/#%E2%80%9CWatch_Online_%E2%80%98Television_Event_Review_A_Documentary_Looks_Back_at_%E2%80%98The_Day_After%E2%80%9D\" >&#8220;Watch Online &#8216;Television Event&#8217; Review: A Documentary Looks Back at &#8216;The Day After&#8217;&#8221;<\/a><\/li><li class='ez-toc-page-1 ez-toc-heading-level-2'><a class=\"ez-toc-link ez-toc-heading-2\" href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/watch-television-event-review-a-documentary-looks-back-at-the-day-after\/#%E2%80%9C%E2%80%98Television_Event_Review_A_Documentary_Looks_Back_at_%E2%80%98The_Day_After%E2%80%9D\" >&#8220;&#8216;Television Event&#8217; Review: A Documentary Looks Back at &#8216;The Day After&#8217;&#8221;<\/a><\/li><\/ul><\/nav><\/div>\n<h2>&#8220;Watch Online &#8216;Television Event&#8217; Review: A Documentary Looks Back at &#8216;The Day After'&#8221;<\/h2>\n<h2>&#8220;&#8216;Television Event&#8217; Review: A Documentary Looks Back at &#8216;The Day After'&#8221;<\/h2>\n<div>\n                        In the age of streaming, the phrase \u201cTV-movie\u201d has been rendered all but meaningless. It now encompasses everything from a Disney Channel musical like \u201cZombies 2\u201d to \u201cMy Dinner with Herv\u00e9\u201d to \u201cMank.\u201d But 30 or 40 years ago, the phrase \u201cTV-movie\u201d meant something specific \u2014 a two-hour drama made for one of the big three networks (who were the only <a href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/category\/game\/\" data-internallinksmanager029f6b8e52c=\"7\" title=\"Game\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">game<\/a> in town), and it also meant a \u201cmovie\u201d that had a certain cheesy overexplicit cardboard quality. Not to be a snob about it, but a TV-movie wasn\u2019t cinema; it was\u2026TV. (This was back when pointing that out wasn\u2019t insulting an art form.)<\/p>\n<p>To be sure, there were a small number of great TV-<a href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/category\/watch-movies-tv-seriess\/\" data-internallinksmanager029f6b8e52c=\"8\" title=\"Watch Movies &amp; TV Series\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">movies<\/a>, like \u201cBrian\u2019s Song\u201d or Spielberg\u2019s \u201cDuel\u201d or the Sally Field tour de force \u201cSybil.\u201d But most of the time the form was decidedly declass\u00e9. And on Nov. 20, 1983, when ABC aired \u201cThe Day After,\u201d its dramatization of a nuclear attack on American soil \u2014 a film that dared to show the unshowable, and to pitch it to the widest possible audience \u2014 the fundamental experience of the film was tied to the fact that it was a TV-movie. In essence, it was the earnest made-for-network version of a \u201970s disaster film, full of thinly sketched characters we would have had zero investment in had it not been for the fact that the banality of their stories ran smack into nuclear Armageddon.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cTelevision Event\u201d is a documentary about \u201cThe Day After.\u201d It looks back on how the film was conceived by the ABC Motion Picture Division president Brandon Stoddard, how it took shape and got made, the battles that were fought on its behalf (many of them with the network\u2019s Standards and Practices division, which was nearly as fuddy-duddy as the Hays Code), the controversies it inspired, and the effect it had on the viewing public. Though \u201cThe Day After\u201d took pains to be apolitical (it never showed us how the nuclear war got started, confining itself to the ground\u2019s-eye-view of a group of ordinary citizens in Lawrence, Kan.), conservatives saw it as liberal propaganda: an implicit argument for chopping down American military might.<\/p>\n<p>Yet President Ronald Reagan screened the film at Camp David (he and Nancy were avid movie buffs), and it had an effect on him. In his diary, he wrote that \u201cThe Day After\u201d \u201cleft me greatly depressed,\u201d and given that Reagan, in his second term, worked with the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to put the brakes on the nuclear arms race, \u201cTelevision Event\u201d suggests, with some justification, that this may have been one instance in which a simple TV-movie nudged an American president in the right direction. (The film must have spoken to him more than Prince\u2019s \u201cRonnie, Talk to Russia.\u201d) The documentary presents \u201cThe Day After\u201d as a primal piece of popular culture that gave the entire nation a badly needed wake-up call.<\/p>\n<p>And that\u2019s certainly one way to look at it. A hundred million people saw \u201cThe Day After\u201d (it\u2019s almost impossible to imagine that kind of unified television audience today), and many were shaken by it, because how could you not be? The film\u2019s defining sequence, in which a mushroom cloud rises up over the Kansas wilderness and people get singed into X-rays (the movie\u2019s way of depicting the fact that they\u2019re being vaporized), exerted a primal shock and awe. \u201cTelevision Event\u201d hails \u201cThe Day After\u201d as the rare case of a TV network not just pushing the envelope but bursting it, making the rare TV-movie that shook people to their souls.<\/p>\n<p>Except that the messengers, in this case, have a vested interest in making that claim. \u201cTelevision Event\u201d is 90 minutes long, and its first hour consists entirely of the recollections of the people who made \u201cThe Day After\u201d: Brandon Stoddard (who died in 2014), the director Nicholas Meyer, the screenwriter Edward Hume, the producer Stephanie Austin, the actress Ellen Anthony (who played the pigtailed farm girl Joleen), and so on. Their stories are entertaining, but the premise of almost every comment is, \u201cHere\u2019s how we brought off this remarkable feat,\u201d and that turns much of the documentary into the kind of wide-eyed \u201cMaking of \u2018The Day After&#8217;\u201d featurette you\u2019d expect to see as a DVD extra.<\/p>\n<p>The problem isn\u2019t what\u2019s there. Stoddard, Meyer, and the rest are vivid inside storytellers, and there\u2019s a juiciness to hearing about how Meyer, who had just completed filming on \u201cStar Trek II: The Wrath of Khan,\u201d became like Orson Welles in the land of small-screen hacks, fighting for every scene, making himself \u201cdifficult,\u201d getting fired, writing an impassioned memo after he saw the cut that the network put together, and finally rejoining the project. The issue with \u201cTelevision Event,\u201d though, is what\u2019s not there: a shred of commentary that isn\u2019t pimping for the movie, that might provide a larger cultural context for it or even (God forbid) look a bit askance at what \u201cThe Day After\u201d \u201cachieved.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>From my own memories of that Sunday night in 1983, \u201cThe Day After\u201d wasn\u2019t a particularly good movie. It was all about the build-up to the nuclear attack, and when that occurred, it was certainly unlike anything you\u2019d ever seen on network television before. But \u201cThe Day After,\u201d as its title suggests, was at heart a film about the aftermath of the bomb dropping \u2014 and this came down to a lot of actors in blood and bandages, with melting skin, skulking past grimy battered post-apocalyptic sets. It\u2019s not like it was all that <em>convincing<\/em>. (If it had been made by, say, the Steven Soderbergh of \u201cContagion,\u201d it would have been five times as unsettling.) The film was kind of a drag \u2014 which I suppose, on some level, was the idea. But even art about catastrophe shouldn\u2019t drag you down.<\/p>\n<p>Brandon Stoddard shepherded \u201cThe Day After\u201d with a devotion that never wavered, and his directive from the outset was, \u201cMake it as realistic as possible.\u201d But in 1983, there were limits to the vision of a television executive whose job came down to one thing: piling up eyeballs. As Stoddard watched the dailies, his first comment was, \u201cToo dark.\u201d In other words, what Meyer had shot didn\u2019t have the showroom lighting of a TV-movie. Yet that one early note is profoundly revealing, since the <em>lighting<\/em> of TV-movies was always half the problem with them. They were lit up like commercials; the lighting annihilated any mystery. (That\u2019s why TV-movies weren\u2019t cinema.)<\/p>\n<p>\u201cTelevision Event\u201d remembers the early \u201980s as a time of abundant fear about the prospect of nuclear war, and abundant innocence, too. But I would argue that the era wasn\u2019t nearly as na\u00efve as all that. The film\u2019s director, Jeff Daniels, was five years old when his extended family gathered to watch \u201cThe Day After.\u201d They put him to bed before the nuclear-attack sequence, but he remembers being freaked out by the previous month\u2019s worth of doomsday publicity. Yet for those of us who didn\u2019t h<a href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/category\/download-scripts-themes-apps\/\" data-internallinksmanager029f6b8e52c=\"9\" title=\"Download Scripts &amp; Themes &amp; Apps\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">app<\/a>en to be in kindergarten at the time, this wasn\u2019t exactly the age of fallout shelters and \u201cduck and cover.\u201d If \u201cThe Day After\u201d <em>was<\/em> a wake-up call, the grand irony of that statement is that it\u2019s only because too many Americans had already had their brains melted down by too much bad TV.<\/p>\n<p>That applies to Reagan as well. That \u201cThe Day After\u201d may actually have influenced his nuclear policy represents not so much an artistic triumph as a moral shock: 40 years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 20 years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, it took <em>this movie<\/em> to convince the President of the United States that it might be smart to tone down his saber-rattling and try to avoid a nuclear war instead of treating the prospect of one as a winnable cowboy showdown? If \u201cTelevision Event\u201d reveals anything, it\u2019s that Reagan, in his life\u2019s-a-movie way, was already paving the way for Donald Trump \u2014 for the era when entertainment would nuke reality.<\/p><\/div>\n<p><script type=\"text\/plain\" class=\"optanon-category-C0004\">\n  !function(f, b, e, v, n, t, s) {\n    if (f.fbq) return;\n    n = f.fbq = function() {\n      n.callMethod ?\n          n.callMethod.apply(n, arguments) : n.queue.push(arguments);\n    };\n    if (!f._fbq) f._fbq = n;\n    n.push = n;\n    n.loaded = !0;\n    n.version = '2.0';\n    n.queue = [];\n    t = b.createElement(e);\n    t.async = !0;\n    t.src = v;\n    s = b.getElementsByTagName(e)[0];\n    s.parentNode.insertBefore(t, s);\n  }(window, document, 'script',\n      'https:\/\/connect.facebook.net\/en_US\/fbevents.js');\n  fbq('init', '586935388485447');\n  fbq('init', '315552255725686');\n  fbq('track', 'PageView');\n<\/script><\/p>\n<blockquote><p><strong><span style=\"color: #ff6600;\">If you liked the article, do not forget to share it with your friends. Follow us on\u00a0<span style=\"color: #ff0000;\"><a style=\"color: #ff0000;\" href=\"https:\/\/news.google.com\/publications\/CAAqBwgKMLG0nwswvr63Aw\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener noreferrer\">Google News<\/a><\/span>\u00a0too, click on the star and choose us from your favorites.<\/span><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<blockquote>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">For forums sites go to <span style=\"color: #ff9900;\"><a style=\"color: #ff9900;\" href=\"https:\/\/forum.buradabiliyorum.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Forum.BuradaBiliyorum.Com<\/a><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<blockquote>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>If you want to read more Like this articles, you can visit our <span style=\"color: #ff9900;\"><a style=\"color: #ff9900;\" href=\"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/watch-movies-tv-series\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Watch Movies &#038; TV Series <\/a><\/span>category<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p><span style=\"color: black;\"><a style=\"color: #ff9900;\" href=\"https:\/\/variety.com\/2020\/film\/reviews\/television-event-review-the-day-after-1234831819\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;Watch Online &#8216;Television Event&#8217; Review: A Documentary Looks Back at &#8216;The Day After&#8217;&#8221; &#8220;&#8216;Television Event&#8217; Review: A Documentary Looks Back at &#8216;The Day After&#8217;&#8221; In the age of streaming, the phrase \u201cTV-movie\u201d has been rendered all but meaningless. It now encompasses everything from a Disney Channel musical like \u201cZombies 2\u201d to \u201cMy Dinner with Herv\u00e9\u201d&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":112574,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/variety.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/11\/TELEVISION-EVENT-Key-Still.jpg?w=1024","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-112573","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-watch-movies-tv-seriess"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112573","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=112573"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112573\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/112574"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=112573"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=112573"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=112573"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}