Apocalypse Television: How The Day After Helped End the Cold War

By David Craig and Robert Iger

On November 20, 1983, a three-hour made-for-TV movie The Day After premiered on ABC. Set in the heartland of Lawrence, Kansas, the film depicted the events before, during, and after a Soviet nuclear attack with vivid scenes of the post-apocalyptic hellscape that would follow. The film was viewed by over 100 million Americans and remains the highest rated TV movie in history. After the premiere, ABC News aired an episode of Viewpoint, a live special featuring some of the most prominent public intellectuals of the debating the virtues of the Arms Race and the prospect of a winnable nuclear war. The response to the film proved more powerful than perhaps any film or television program in the history of media. Aside from its record-shattering Nielsen ratings, it enjoyed critical acclaim as well as international box office success in theatrical screenings.

The path to primetime for The Day After proved nearly as treacherous as the film’s narrative. Battles ensued behind the scenes at the network, between the network and the filmmakers, with Broadcast Standards and Ad Sales, in the edit room and on the set, including the “nuke-mares” experienced by the cast. After the director was pushed aside, he contemplated suicide while also engineering a comeback through the press. But these skirmishes pale in comparison to the culture wars triggered by the film in the press, alongside a growing Nuclear Freeze movement, and from a united, pro-nuclear Right. Once efforts to alter the script failed, the White House conducted a full-throttled propaganda campaign to hijack the film’s message.

Apocalypse Television features a dramatic insider’s account of the making of and backlash against The Day After. No other book has told this story in similar fashion, venturing behind-the-scenes of the programming and news divisions at ABC, Reagan officials in the White House who mounted the propaganda campaign, rogue publicists who hijacked the film to promote a Nuclear Freeze, the backlash from the conservative movement and Religious Right, the challenges encountered by film’s production team from conception to reception, and the experiences of the citizens of Lawrence, Kansas, where the film was set and shot, if also, ground zero in America’s nuclear heartland.

• Language: English
• Publisher: RowmanLittlefield
• Release date: Nov 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9781493079186

David Craig

David Craig was born in Aberdeen and educated there and in Cambridge. He has taught literature and social history in schools and universities in England, Scotland and Sri Lanka. He has published several books on Natural History and Social History, including The Glens of Silence which was published by Birlinn in 2004. He lives in Cumbria.

Book preview

APOCALYPSE TELEVISION

APOCALYPSE TELEVISION

How The Day After Helped End the Cold War

David Craig

Foreword by Robert Iger

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Essex, Connecticut

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An imprint of Globe Pequot, the trade division of

The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

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Lanham, MD 20706

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Distributed by NATIONAL BOOK NETWORK

Copyright © 2024 by David Craig

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Craig, David Randolph, author. | Iger, Robert, writer of foreword.

Title: Apocalypse television : how The day after helped end the cold war / David Craig ; foreword by Robert Iger.

Description: Essex, Connecticut : Applause, 2024. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023029678 (print) | LCCN 2023029679 (ebook) | ISBN 9781493079179 (cloth) | ISBN 9781493079186 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Day after (Motion picture) | Apocalypse in motion pictures. | Motion pictures—Influence—Case studies. | Science fiction films—History and criticism. | Nuclear warfare—Social aspects—United States.

Classification: LCC PN1997.D327 C73 2024 (print) | LCC PN1997.D327 (ebook) | DDC 791.43/72—dc23/eng/20230717

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023029678

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023029679

frn_fig_004.png The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992

This book is dedicated to Brandon Stoddard and all the television movie executives, producers, filmmakers, and storytellers over the decades who were willing to risk their careers to harness the power of Hollywood to entertain, educate, and enlighten.

Contents

Cover

Half Title

Title

Copyright

Dedication

Contents

Foreword

Prologue

1 The Missile Messenger

2 The Apocalypse Team

3 The Wrath of Meyer

4 Ground Zero Kansas

5 Post Wars and Star Wars

6 Hijacked

7 Coming Destructions

8 Pre-emptive Strike

9 Countdown

10 Fallout

11 Rapprochement

Conclusion: Aftermath

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Foreword

Robert Iger

During the Cold War, the closest I ever came to causing an international incident was trying to get permission from the Russian Federation to air the US-Soviet hockey game at the 1980s Olympics in prime time. As vice-president of ABC’s sports division on the East Coast, geopolitical battles were to be waged solely on the field, court, and ping-pong table. (Although a tournament of the latter shot in North Korea created havoc with the US State Department.) As for affairs of state, politics, education, serving the public’s interest? These were tasks typically assigned to my colleagues in the news division. In 1980, few of us were aware that our colleagues in entertainment on the West Coast were in the midst of depicting the aftermath of World War III. But by 1983, everyone in the network knew about The Day After, as did nearly everyone in America.

At the center of the nuclear firestorm was Brandon Stoddard, the head of ABC’s movie division and Circle Films. As depicted in Apocalypse Television, Stoddard conceived the film and proved unwavering in his desire to get the story told, despite every imaginable obstacle. As I write in my book The Ride of a Lifetime, Brandon had great taste and was a talented executive. He not only epitomized quality television, he also harnessed the power of the medium to educate the public and raise awareness, while still delivering ratings and profits to the network. Stoddard came up from within the ranks of ABC, which was an incubator for legendary media executives like Barry Diller, Michael Eisner, and Roone Arledge, and where I spent my entire career. Stoddard learned his craft on the job while simultaneously transforming it. He began in Saturday morning children’s television where he commissioned the award-winning Schoolhouse Rock, then landed in daytime television where he launched ABC Afterschool Specials in partnership with the National Education Association. Once promoted into prime time, Stoddard earned the moniker of the father of miniseries, crafting programs like Roots that, in the span of a single week, arguably changed the public’s awareness of the fraught and long history of race relations in America. But nothing Brandon had attempted was as bold or as dangerous as The Day After.

While a singular force within the network determined to get the film to air, Brandon did not create this film on his own. Much like my colleagues at Disney who helped build the strongest media conglomerate of the twenty-first century, Brandon surrounded himself with tremendous talent. As any great network executive knows, you hire the smartest programming executives in the business, even those who may sometimes disagree with your ideas but will ensure that the stories are well-executed. You surround yourself with the best marketing teams and, in Brandon’s case, allow yourself to appear on 60 Minutes if that’s what it takes to get audiences to tune in.

Beyond the network, the success of The Day After was a consequence of the work of many creatives and stakeholders, starting with the film’s extraordinary writer, producers, director, and actors. As captured in this book, the battles fought behind the scenes of the film were perhaps as epic as the story being told, as were the wars waged in the American public sphere over the fate of the world and nuclear arms. Produced at the height of the nuclear freeze movement, the film would never have succeeded without the support of the citizens of Lawrence, Kansas, where it was set and shot. Local activists from both sides of the debate put down their signs to appear as extras in a film that depicted the end of their world in the wake of a nuclear attack. Outside, in the press, board rooms, and activist organizations, the film sparked fierce debates over our nation’s nuclear policies as well as the role and function of entertainment in politics.

Down the hall from the sports department, my boss Roone Arledge was leading the news division. In response to the fears rising from the film’s airing and aftermath, that division would be charged with making sure that ABC’s disaster film did not incite viewer panic. At the helm of the live Viewpoint special that aired after the film, producer and host Ted Koppel had to confront perhaps the greatest challenge faced by any news broadcaster: how to conduct a civil debate with some of the most notable public intellectuals of the time about the fate of the planet without striking terror into viewers. Few journalists could have navigated this as well as Koppel.

As the book depicts, the battles within the network and between the network and producers would pale in comparison to the backlash waged by those who believed in the path of nuclear deterrence through the policy of mutually assured destruction. This path had kept the United States and the world safe from nuclear attack in the decades since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But the arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union was fraught with fear and anxiety. Stoddard was not afraid to stoke these fears in his determination to raise awareness of the threat of a post-nuclear apocalypse. Although he would insist the film was never political, it was clearly meant to address perhaps the greatest existential threat our world has ever known.

The Day After appeared not only at the peak of the arms race but the broadcast television era as well. After 1983, the arrival of cable, streaming services, and the atomizing effect of the Internet meant that television would never be the same. But, in this brief moment, many television executives and producers, writers and directors, actors and activists understood that television was, as quoted in this book the only book on the shelf. They wielded this power with accountability, striving to balance the needs of the network with the interests of the public.

Few understood this mission better than Brandon Stoddard. In the late 1980s, I would be asked to replace Brandon as head of ABC Entertainment. This was a daunting role as few executives had left as large a footprint as he had. When he passed away in 2014, I stated that he was a true maverick who was instrumental in transforming prime-time television. In fact, he transformed the entire medium and, as argued in this book, may have changed the fate of our planet.

Apocalypse Television recognizes not only Brandon and his colleagues but all the storytellers throughout history who have crafted narratives that helped change our destiny. These include the mythmakers and the marketers, the cinematic auteur and the social media creators who now have the power to tell stories to global audiences. Depending on where it is cited, either Plato or a Native-American proverb stated that those who tell the stories rule the world. As captured in this book, perhaps the better phrase is: those who tell the stories may save the world.

Prologue

Before the Next Day After

Stop shooting, immediately! You threaten the security of the whole world! On March 5, 2022, this warning, in Russian, rang out repeatedly over the public-address system of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in southeastern Ukraine.¹ Outside the walls of the plant, armed Russian soldiers were firing on Ukrainian forces as bombs shattered windows in the plant. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky declared, If there’s an explosion, that’s the end for Europe… the end for everyone. For months, the shelling continued around the plant as the reactors were threatened by cascading power outages that risked an unparalleled nuclear catastrophe. Six months after the start of the Ukraine War, Director General Rafael Grossi, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, warned CNN’s Christiane Amanpour of the very real threat of a nuclear mishap. The situation is very worrying. We are facing great danger. If precautions are not taken immediately, Grossi declared, We are playing with fire.

To borrow from the song lyrics by R.E.M., an event like this could mean the end of the world as we know it. (Except no one felt fine.) Yet, for me, it all seemed eerily and disturbingly familiar.

As news coverage of these events were airing on television, I was starting to write this book, which starts with ABC

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The poster (one-sheet) for the THE DAY AFTER ABC / Photofest © ABC

executive Brandon Stoddard watching the 1979 fictional disaster movie, The China Syndrome. In preparation, I had just rewatched the scene from that movie in which a nuclear power engineer, played by Jack Lemmon, barricaded himself in the control room, taking the plant and the planet hostage. Inspired by the film, Stoddard came up with the idea for The Day After which, as you’ll read here, may be the most important disaster film ever made. If Stoddard were alive today, I can’t help but wonder what else he’d conceive.

Despite referencing a disaster dating back to the 1980s, references to Chernobyl are not lost on contemporary audiences. In 2019, HBO’s Chernobyl became one of the network-turned-streaming-service’s most successful programs. Forbes described the program as the highest rated TV series in history,² although such claims were based on empirically weak, fan-based surveys on the IMDb.com database. (Actual viewer numbers remain elusive in the rapidly accelerating global-streaming video landscape.) According to Variety, it even outperformed HBO’s previous blockbuster, Game of Thrones. No other HBO series had performed as well everywhere around the world—everywhere, that is, except for Russia, where the series was banned.

Still, according to Vice, Chernobyl has been illegally viewed throughout Russia and has had a tangible effect on what people believe about the causes and aftermath of the disaster.³ The series leveled blame at Soviet authorities for covering up the scale of the 1986 accident and exposing millions to radiation. For Russian viewers, this account proved far more than revisionist. The series delivered lost history for a nation nearly unaware that the disaster had even occurred.

The official Russian backlash was visceral. Putin officials decried the series as a caricature and not the truth and referred to the film as US propaganda. One Russian journalist declared, What the fuck? The [US] producers probably think the audience are a bunch of illiterate, stupid idiots, who don’t ask themselves any questions.⁴ In 2021, Russia released the disaster film Chernobyl: Abyss in which local firefighters saved the day, the government cover-up was entirely omitted, and CIA operatives were blamed as saboteurs. In the sport of political entertainment, Russia was fighting nuclear fire with fire.

To borrow from one of President Reagan’s famous phrases, There we go again. In 1983, the backlash to The Day After was arguably as unhinged as the Russian government’s official reaction to Chernobyl. Pro-nuclear advocates were convinced the film’s impact would lead to diplomatic compromises that would cripple the West. They joined with apocalyptic believers from the Religious Right to condemn the film and try to prevent it from airing. Although the White House was not aligned with those hawkish members of the Pentagon who believed that nuclear war was winnable, they perceived the film as a threat to Reagan’s hard-line Soviet policy. They were also convinced the film might lead to panic, a War of the Worlds redux sparked by a fictional disaster film airing on every living-room television set in America.

As I write this prologue in March 2023—almost exactly a year after the attack on the Zaporizhzhia power plant—Russia has just suspended its participation in New START, its most recent nuclear arms treaty with the United States. Its predecessor, the START I Treaty, first signed in 1991, had brought an end to the arms race between the superpowers. Negotiations for the treaty had begun under President Reagan, who wrote in his diary that he was deeply affected by watching The Day After. For Reagan, the film was a dramatization of the reports his military advisors had prepared for him about post-nuclear probabilities. Alongside the airing of this TV movie, as well as the press attention it generated, and politicians’ and the public’s fears about its potential impact, an array of real-world existential crises had occurred in the fall of 1983 that risked open conflict between the United States and USSR. Weeks after watching the film, Reagan appeared to pivot to new rhetoric and policies toward the Soviets. His ambitions aligned with those of the newly elected Communist Party Secretary Gorbachev to end the arms race. For some historians and scientists, the film was arguably a critical factor in saving the world from nuclear oblivion, at least for a few decades.

The following account of the making of, backlash against, and fallout from the TV movie The Day After follows an array of Hollywood executives, storytellers, publicists, and activists drawn into the decades-long history of nuclear gamesmanship between the superpowers. Putin’s turn away from New START is but the latest volley. In the fall of 2019, the United States withdrew from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty while blaming Russia for repeated non-compliance. Two months later, Russia launched their Nudol anti-satellite missile system, which demonstrated its power by destroying a defunct Soviet satellite that was still in orbit. This advanced space-bound system not only ratcheted up fears of a renewed arms race but realized Reagan’s dreams of a nuclear defense shield in outer space. Referred to in the press as Star Wars, Reagan’s plans had proved far less successful than the Hollywood franchise that inspired its nickname, but arguably his vision had been prescient.

Over the past decade, diplomatic and military chess moves in the name of deterrence have come swiftly and generated controversy—as well as occasional inspiration for Hollywood screenwriters. In 2018, the Trump administration withdrew from a multilateral agreement to curb the growth of Iran’s nuclear ambitions, placing little faith in nuclear diplomacy. Now, according to NBC News, Iran is engaged in unprecedented and grave nuclear escalation.⁵ Diplomacy be damned. Half a world away, North Korea tested a nuclear missile capable of reaching the shores of the US for the first time. Next door, China has engaged in the rapid escalation and modernization of their nuclear arsenal. As the Wall Street Journal claims, like it or not, the US is in a nuclear arms race with China.⁶ China’s arsenal includes space-oriented missiles and hypersonic glide vehicles. The latter term might just as easily have been coined by the screenwriters of the Star Wars streaming series The Mandalorian.

In fact, the vast majority of Hollywood franchises mirror international politics from the past century. In The Winter Soldier, Marvel’s Captain America goes rogue rather than aligning with covert government operations developing technology for pre-emptive strikes. The entire Avengers franchise reflects the Manichean debates waged for decades over arms races, nuclear deterrence, and multilateral governance. All of the Star Wars, Harry Potter, and Batman films are chimeric visions of wars now being fought—whether within our psyches, on the streets of America, between emerging superpowers and rogue states—or, more ominously, that will be fought in the future.

Apocalypse Television further considers how one cheaply produced, made-for-television movie, produced at the peak of the broadcast television era before the world was splintered into zeroes and ones, had such a powerful impact on culture and politics. Today, it’s an open question whether we still need brilliant filmmakers like Craig Mazin—the showrunner for Chernobyl and, more recently, the wildly popular post-apocalyptic series The Last of Us— to play modern-day Cassandras, warning us of impending doom. Nor is it clear that we require deeply capitalized film studios or multinational media conglomerates to finance, produce, market, and distribute beautifully crafted, hauntingly powerful narratives. As Disney CEO Robert Iger mentions in his Foreword, we now have the means within the palms of our hands to tell stories that may change the world’s fate.

With the advent of social media platforms, we are all speakers around a global campfire. Before returning to his homeland, Alexei Navalny, the most prominent Russian opposition leader to threaten Putin’s power, released a documentary on You-Tube.⁷ Hosted, written, produced, and directed by Navalny, Putin’s Palace detailed rampant corruption committed by the Russian leader and his fellow oligarchs. The film has been viewed over 126 million times on the original channel, with millions more views on other channels and references in other videos. This statistic includes more than twenty-six percent of the Russian population, according to an independent Russian polling firm that took a poll within two weeks of the film’s release on the platform.

What happens next with all this power coursing through the mobile phones in our hands? Curiously, the Russian government has yet to ban YouTube, although they have launched a comparable platform, RuTube, one of many digital platforms and social-media services that emulate Silicon Valley innovation. These efforts signal Russia’s efforts toward building a parallel Internet, according to Emerson Brooking, a senior expert at the Atlantic Council. Only they need not look so far west for inspiration.

While not quite their version of the Western-run, global-scale Internet, China offers alternatives to the West’s domination of global online services and websites. Incubated within its borders but increasingly competing beyond them, China has launched state-of-the-art streaming services, comparable to Netflix and Spotify. Throughout China and within developing countries on the digital periphery, China delivers even better, more frictionless mobile-banking systems, more affordable and advanced smart phones, state-of-the-art cellular services, e-commerce systems that rival Amazon, and, of course, alternative forms of social media. As of this writing, the threat du jour is TikTok, which is the focus of much political concern in the United States, even as it is harnessed by children and teenagers delivering youth culture and expression from and to the most remote corners of the planet.

Apocalypse Television was written in response to the parallels between past and present. Replace Reagan with Presidents before or since and Putin with any Soviet leader. Swap out TV with YouTube and nuclear peril with global pandemics. Many of the basic contours of the stories are the same, and the need for world-saving narratives all the more urgent. The executives, producers, screenwriter, and director of The Day After laid the groundwork for entertainment executives who doubtlessly placed their careers in some peril by advocating for politically themed content. The strategies all these storytellers used to reach the broadest possible audiences with the most compelling narratives represent a form of resistance to our species’ dogged insistence on booking tours to Armageddon.

If this prologue strikes fear into readers, the rest of the book is meant to allay them. More than an account of television history or a political palliative, this book serves as a primer for how we might anticipate our planet’s future and rescript its fate. As has been true since we first became sentient creatures, storytellers have the capacity to change the future, whether in Hollywood or Bollywood or at the corner of Main Street and Facebook. In fact, now may be the best time to harness that power. Too frequently over the past century we’ve been perched on the eve of the apocalypse, just minutes before midnight, standing on the edge of oblivion. Or you can choose your own metaphor. After all, we’re all storytellers now.

1

The Missile Messenger

By Los Angeles standards, mid-March 1979 had been cold and wet. ABC’s head of TV movies, Brandon Stoddard, was looking forward to escaping the chill by heading into his local movie theater to watch The China Syndrome, which delivered a fictional account of the consequences of a nuclear power plant disaster. As the Father of the Miniseries who had spearheaded efforts to bring Roots to the small screen, Stoddard was struggling to find the concept for his next event project. Event projects are high concept, provocative, culturally and politically sensitive fare, designed to draw attention, acclaim, and publicity well beyond the pages of TV Guide or People magazine. Beyond high ratings and Emmys, the larger cultural impact of Roots gave Stoddard the rush of crafting television that arguably changed the hearts and minds of the American public. Driving home from the theater, Stoddard realized his concept.

Growing up in 1940s Connecticut, the scion of generations of lawyers, in a wealthy Republican town, Stoddard would have been well aware that history was no longer written just by the victors or even historians. By the middle of the twentieth century, history was already being rewritten by Hollywood, something that had started as early as 1915 with D. W. Griffith’s controversial film Birth of a Nation. Increasingly, Madison Avenue pitch-men, New York playwrights, and West Coast executives were

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Brandon Stoddard, the ABC executive who conceived The Day After and risked his career to get the story to the screen, at his 2014 induction into the Television Academy Hall of Fame. He spent most of his career at ABC where he reinvented children’s programming ( Schoolhouse Rock ) and afternoon programming ( Afterschool Specials ), and became known as the father of the miniseries, launching epic programs like Roots and The Winds of