Word: amerika
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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WITH THE GREAT Amerika brouhaha exploding over our heads weeks before the show itself begins, the American media will once again don hairshirts and bewail either the excess or absence of the proper political sensitivities in our art forms. Both contentions are nonsense, as politics is almost always irrelevant to the American public's perception of the arts...
This jarring mix of Norman Rockwell and Red Nightmare is one of the more alarming scenes in ABC's upcoming mini-series Amerika. Three years and nearly $40 million in the making, the 14 1/4-hr. epic, which will run for seven installments starting Sunday, Feb. 15, imagines what the U.S. might be like under the domination of the Soviet Union. The fictional takeover has been bloodless (just how it took place is purposely kept hazy), but the consequences are drastic. A puppet President sits in the White House while Soviet officials pull the strings and plot to dismantle the Republic...
Still two weeks away from its telecast, Amerika has incited what may be the biggest avalanche of protest against any program in TV history. Moscow has denounced it as dangerous propaganda, liberal groups have complained that it will fuel anti-Soviet sentiment, and the United Nations is upset that the movie portrays its troops as ruthless marauders. Critics have raced into print with condemnations of the still unfinished movie, many of them based only on bootleg scripts or a 90-minute presentation tape. Last week the protesters scored a major victory: Chrysler Corp., the show's largest advertiser, announced that...
...storm over Amerika has all but demolished any chance that the mini- series, when it finally reaches the screen, will be judged on its own merits. Which is too bad, because the segments that have been completed (six hours so far) reveal a far more subtle, challenging and skillfully woven drama than the advance brouhaha would suggest. Its political implications aside, Amerika is the sort of project that network TV seldom tries and even more seldom achieves: a thought-provoking epic...
Everyday life in Amerika is not hard to recognize. People still complain about the government and the hard economic times, only now it is the Soviets who are to blame. Parents still have fights with their children, only now the argument over whether Dad has pulled strings to get his daughter into a dance company has nasty overtones of political collaboration. Even the smallest details are shrewdly familiar: the bored, hollow-eyed bureaucrat who processes Devin out of prison ("You got a red-tag file . . . It's probably screwed up, most of 'em are"); a forlorn production of The Fantasticks...