Amerika (TV miniseries)

Amerika suggesting a Russified name for the United States 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 17yearold 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 American people a decade after the Soviet conquest. The intent, he later explained, was to explore the American spirit under such conditions, not to portray the conflict of the Soviet coup.

Amerika has an indirect connection to another notable ABC program, the 1983 television film The Day After, which some critics felt was too pacifist for portraying the doctrine of nuclear deterrence as pointless. Stoddard cited a column in the Los Angeles HeraldExaminer by Nixon speechwriter and later, television personality Ben Stein that appeared a few weeks before The Day After aired. Stein wrote, in part...since my dear friends at ABCTV have made a TV movie very rightly describing the terror of an atomic attack on America, perhaps they might consider something else. Perhaps they might make a TV movie about why the people of the United States face such a dreadful risk. They might make a movie about what life in the United States would be like if we lived under Soviet domination. ........

Source: Wikipedia