Television Event

If you ever saw The Day After in 1983 chances are its chilling story never left you.

If you never did, then Television Event is the perfect time capsule for you.

This Australian-made documentary by US born producer director Jeff Daniels transports back to a time when the Cold War between America and the USSR was on a knife-edge. A nuclear disaster of catastrophic proportions was seemingly right around the corner.

Enter film director Nicholas Meyer, hired to helm a project which would become The Day After for ABC’s Sunday Night Movie.

It was ABC’s movies exec Brandon Stoddard who decided rather than make an endless stream of forgettable telemovies the network should try to make a difference by tackling the nuclear threat. It would be a trajectory full of controversy, brinkmanship, fear and politics but also record ratings and even landmark changes.

Nicholas Meyer, fresh from directing Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, was tasked with the job along with producer Robert Papazian and writer Ed Hume, who reveals in this doco he fully intended to script for political change. Yet rather than craft a US vs Russian tale, it would be the impact itself that would drive the story. After all in the 1980s the world had enough nuclear arsenals to obliterate every man, woman and child on the planet 54 times over….

Nicholas Meyer also aimed for as much realism as possible in an era without CGI. This led to artistic differences with the network over the use of blood, fears of skin burning off humans, and the confronting nature of dramatising post-apocalypse victims. Nobody had ever attempted to put a nuclear war onto primetime television before in this kind of forum. While Meyer was fully aware of the responsibility before him, it unnerved execs, advertisers and eventually the White House.

Under the Reagan administration, there were moves to minimise the impact of the drama prior to its airing. I won’t spoil the rollercoaster Meyer and his associates endured trying to get this to air, suffice to say he became known as a “difficult” director.

Daniels’ doco draws from recent interviews with key players, including Meyer, Papazian, Hume, Stoddard, Associate Producer Stephanie Austin, Ken Adelman from the Reagan Administration, and veteran news anchor Ted Koppel. While the film featured Jason Robards, JoBeth Williams, Steve Guttenberg and John Lithgow, it is a former child actor Ellen Moore who revisits the shooting, and even the trauma it still brings her.

Archival footage of the original film is both compelling and kookily-dated, but there is rare behind the scenes vision of how scenes were constructed. One famous scene from Gone with the Wind was the inspiration for a basketball stadium full of apocalypctic victims on stretchers, drawing upon thousands of extras.

A key part of Daniels’ documentary is the impact The Day After had when it went to air in America: 100 million viewers, all at one time (a cinema release in Australia) confronted by the possibility of nuclear war on their doorstep. There were candlelight vigils, TV forums, protests and debate.

Years later -if not directly linked to the telemovie- President Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev would agree to nuclear disarmament at their Reykjavík Summit.

Television Event is a captivating time capsule of creative compromises and passion hitting you right between the eyes from the 1980s. Mostly it’s a ripping yarn about the power of television. Don’t miss it.

Television Event 10:10pm Thursday on SBS VICELAND