The Storm Over Amerika: ABC News Viewpoint Panel Discussion w/Ted Kopell - anti-Russian propaganda

February 23, 1987, 10:30 pm, Viewpoint ABC Nightline

Also on the panel, CNN's Ted Turner, Jeane Kirkpatrick, UN attorney Ted Sorensen and Russian ambassador Gennadi Gerasimov

Amerika is an American television miniseries that was broadcast in 1987 on ABC. The miniseries inspired a novelization entitled Amerika: The Triumph of the American Spirit. Amerika starred Kris Kristofferson, Mariel Hemingway, Sam Neill, Robert Urich, and a 17-year-old Lara Flynn Boyle in her first major role. Amerika was about life in the United States after a bloodless takeover engineered by the Soviet Union. Not wanting to depict the actual takeover, ABC Entertainment president Brandon Stoddard set the miniseries ten years after the event, focusing on the demoralized U.S. people a decade after the Soviet conquest. The intent, he later explained, was to explore the U.S. spirit under such conditions, not to portray the conflict of the Soviet coup.

The first two nights of Amerika garnered big ratings, but audience numbers dropped thereafter, and the overall miniseries averaged a 19 rating and a 29 share of American television households, compared to a 46 rating/62 share for The Day After. "It wasn't as big a hit as its supporters had hoped," said Ted Koppel, "but it wasn't a disaster, either." Amerika was the second-highest rated miniseries of the 1986–87 U.S. television season.

Amerika was preceded by an ABC special addressing the considerable controversy prior to its airing (The Storm Over Amerika), and was followed by an "ABC News Viewpoint" panel discussion moderated by Ted Koppel, with Brandon Stoddard, Donald Wrye, and others addressing the issues along with questions and comments from a live studio audience in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

After seeing the first episode and reading the shooting script, Tom Engelhardt stated that Amerika had "a plot line that makes suspension of disbelief into an act of grace." In its summary of the 1986–87 US television season, TV Guide called the miniseries "arguably the most boring miniseries in a decade," adding that "ABC's Amerika tried to hold America hostage for seven tedious nights (and a stupefyingly dull 14½ hours) by conjuring up a fuzzy vision of a Communist occupation of the U.S."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amerika_(miniseries)