The bare facts are astonishing enough. ABC, the network that brought us Sam Donaldson and The Day After, is staking $35 million and some 15 hours of its choicest prime time during the February ratings sweeps on the mini-series Amerika, which depicts in lascivious detail the horrors of an imaginary Soviet occupation of the United States. One hardly knows what to think. It’s as if PBS had followed up The Africans with a ten-part Masterpiece Theatre version of Atlas Shrugged.
Needless to say, the Russians are foaming at the mouth at the prospect of so relentless an exercise in Commie-bashing. But the irony is that they have only themselves to blame. Their crude attempt last January to blackmail ABC into scrapping Amerika by threatening to shut down the network’s Moscow news bureau made it impossible for Brandon Stoddard and ABC Circle Films to weasel out of producing the series. Matters were made considerably worse when the American Friends Service Committee got hold of a copy of the shooting script and leaked it to various left-wing journalists, most of whom have denounced it with extraordinary ferocity. (I sat two rows ahead of a Rolling Stone correspondent at an Amerika screening. You could hear the sneer on his face.) There’s even an organization operating out of New York that was apparently started solely to issue irate press releases about Amerika.
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