I Miss The Days of TV Movie Events, Even Ones Like The Day After (1983)
Note: I selected The Day After as this week’s topic solely because my beloved hometown film festival is screening a documentary about it (it’s called Television Event) as their opening night film in one week. If you’re in or near Birmingham, you should attend this in-person event about a television event!
A few of my friends have been referring to Netflix original releases as “TV movies” for years now.
I pushed back against that take at first. It seemed pretty reductive. Yes, these movies are delivered straight to our televisions (or laptops, or tablets, or phones). And yes, more and more these days, Netflix originals are about on par with the TV movies of yesteryear. So I see their point.
My main retort has always been something like “Martin Scorsese and Alfonso Cuaron and the Coen Brothers and Ava DuVernay and David Fincher don’t make ‘TV movies.’” But I think there’s a bigger difference than the quality of the films here—it’s the ubiquity of the experience that’s missing.
Netflix films, aside from some obvious outliers, are a dime a dozen. We get at least a new one every week, usually on a Friday, and while some of them are entertaining, I feel like we tend to forget about most of them by Monday morning. But a good TV movie? One that captures the imagination of the nation? There’s nothing quite like it.
Now, I reached this earthly plane in 1986 and didn’t pay attention to movies until the 90s (babies are rarely cinephiles, I think). So by that time, TV movies were kinda on the way out. But I loved tuning in for miniseries events, especially Stephen King stuff—The Stand, Storm of the Century, that dreadful remake of The Shining (give me a break, I was 10). What they lacked in quality they made up for in marketability, and yes, I hate that I just typed that. But it’s kinda true.
And thanks to Cold War panic, the marketability of The Day After was through the roof.
It’s the highest-rated television film ever (at least as of 2009, but I’m pretty sure it hasn’t been dethroned since then), one that was broadcast in nearly 39 million homes and watched by more than 100 million Americans. 100 million! Think about that. Movies, especially original ones, are lucky to clear 100 million dollars, and this thing was basically seen by half the country.
And it’s a total bummer! God, I wish I could build a time machine just so I could go back to 1983 and watch The Day After with any white-picket-fence nuclear family. Even Ronald Reagan said the film was “very effective” and it left him “greatly depressed.” It apparently affected his policy decisions too, which is wild, but then again, it’s Ronald Reagan.
The film itself isn’t very plot-driven; it’s more like a two-hour PSA about nuclear war. We follow various characters for a while as they do various things, and then a nuclear fallout happens, and they all become desperate or deranged or dead. My favorite thing about it is that it takes place in Lawrence, Kansas (and prominently features KU memorabilia). I love it when films and shows and books are set in Kansas or Nebraska. It’s as if to say “This story takes place in the very middle of the country, so it could happen to you!”
Actually, no, my favorite thing is this: The Day After called its shot like Babe Ruth pointing at the damn bleachers.
At one point, some guy is watching a TV news report about the incoming Soviet missiles, and somebody isn’t taking it seriously. So he says “You think they’re making this up? You think this is ‘War of the Worlds’ or something?” I gotta give credit to Edward Hume, somewhat of a TV movie screenplay savant (he got an Emmy nomination for this!), for that one. He knew this film would make waves.
Of course, it wasn’t quite the same as Orson Welles’ infamous radio broadcast. Mostly because anyone who watched The Day After could look outside their window, see a missile-less sky, and feel (temporarily) reassured that all wasn’t lost (yet). But an entire nation was shook. And most importantly, they were shook together.
I wish that happened more often, even if collective anxiety was the order of the day. Social media is a thing now, and such collective experiences could be amplified in a remarkable way. (Remember those five beautiful weeks where we all watched The Last Dance together? I loved that so much. Give me more of that, please.)
For now, at least we all have Netflix. Let me know if y’all wanna watch The Kissing Booth 3 together or something.
The Day After is available in full on YouTube. It has millions of views, so it’s probably legal to watch it.