Documentary Releases: Television Event (2020) - Reviewed

Courtesy of Screen Australia
On November 20th, 1983, the face of American network television changed forever with the ABC broadcast of the made-for-TV film The Day After, a sobering post-apocalyptic science-fiction horror film about the aftermath of a nuclear exchange.  Directed by Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan realisateur Nicholas Meyer in a shaky foray from Hollywood to the small screen, it was a star studded, effects heavy literal Television Event in which millions of Americans watched their country, cities and hometowns decimated in a flash of light, hundreds of humans evaporated instantly, followed by months of slow painful death for those who survived. 
 
Going on to become the highest-rated television film in the history of the medium, The Day After also influenced the signing of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 1987 by then-US president Ronald Reagan and Soviet Union leader Mikhail Gorbachev.  Though the film followed in the footsteps of Peter Watkins’ The War Game and often gets compared to the UK television film Threads, The Day After left its mark on the American public, geopolitical powers and gradually modern television itself as seen by the success of HBO’s nuclear disaster series Chernobyl.

 
Despite being delayed by COVID-19, the 2020 documentary film Television Event by Jeff Daniels (not the actor) seeks to examine that tumultuous period mired in controversy and at-the-time real world fears of nuclear holocaust which generated a televised a journey to the general public few theatrical films were willing to embark on.  Comprised of archival footage, original production notes, outtakes and newly conducted interviews with surviving members including but not limited to Meyer, Ted Koppel, screenwriter Edward Hume and many more, the film is a top to bottom look at before and after the production and release of unquestionably the most controversial television program ever aired.
 
Stories of network censorship, producers clashing with a headstrong director determined to do it right and not pull any punches, attempts to prevent it from being aired at all are among the many wild things that befell what ultimately became The Day After as recalled with fondness and embitterment by those who lived through it.  As a documentary film Television Event is an engaging and riveting smorgasbord of production battles leading up to a potentially banned broadcast and finally the shockwaves the already shaky project would unleash on the unsuspecting television public at large. 

 
While years have dissipated the mushroom cloud generated by the television broadcast of The Day After, in 1983 it raged through American homes like wildfire and shattered the public in its wake.  Nothing like it had come before or arguably since save for the UK’s answer to it with 1984’s Threads.  So powerful was the film’s cultural impact it garnered a fully fledged theatrical release in Europe including but not limited to Japan where survivors of the Hiroshima bombing spoke to the film’s realism.  If nothing else, Television Event is an attempt to make sense of the film’s legacy as the one time mainstream network television set off weapons of mass destruction in millions of American homes.

--Andrew Kotwicki