The show was the brainchild of Brandon Stoddard, then president of the ABC Motion Picture Division, who had been impressed by the theatrical film The China Syndrome. Directed by Nicholas Meyer, a feature film director, The Day After went on to be either broadcast or released as a theatrical feature in more than 40 countries. In Britain, for example, an edited version was shown on the ITV commercial network three weeks after the U.S. broadcast, with the U.K.airing accompanied by a Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament recruitment drive. In a country that had yet to transmit Peter Watkins’s film on the topic of nuclear war, The War Game, most British critics dismissed The Day After as a travesty, a typically tasteless American treatment of this major theme.

Wherever it was shown, The Day After raised questions about the genre and about politically committed TV and its ideological effects. Was it a drama-documentary, a combination of fact and fiction (how do you depict a catastrophe that has not yet happened?), or was it a disaster movie? Some argued that the program stretched the limits of the medium, in the tradition of Roots and Holocaust, manipulating a variety of prestige-TV and -film propaganda devices to raise itself above the ratings was in order to attempt to address a universal audience about a 20th-century nightmare.

ABC defined the production in terms of realism (for example, rosters of scientific advisers helped design the special effects used during the depictions of missiles and the blast), and the network defined it in terms of art, as a surrealist vision of destruction of Western civilization as it affected a midwestern town (Lawrence, Kansas) and family (graphically represented in the movie poster). Network executives were particularly aware of the issues of taste and the impact of horror on sensitive viewers (they knew that Watkins’s film had been deemed “too horrifying for the medium of television”); however, it was assumed that the majority of the audience was already inured to depictions of suffering. the delicate issue of identification with victims and survivors was handled by setting the catastrophe in a real town and using a large cast of relatively unknown actors (although John Lithgow, JoBeth Williams, Steve Guttenberg, and Amy Madigan would eventually become established well-known actors) and a horde of extras, while at the center of the story stood the venerable Jason Robards as a doctor. Time magazine opined that “much of the power came from the quasi-documentary idea that nuclear destruction had been visited upon the real town of Lawrence, Kansas, rather than upon some back lot of Warner Brothers.” Scriptwriter Edward Hume decided to downplay the more inflammatory, political aspects of the scenario: “It’s not about politics or politicians or military decision-makers. It is simply about you and me— doctors, farmers, teachers, students, brothers and kid sisters engaged in the usual love and labor of life in the month of September.” (This populist dimension was reinforced when the mayor of Lawrence sent a telegram to Soviet leader Yuri Andropov.)

There is an American pastoralism at work in the depiction of prairie life. Director Nicholas Meyer (Star Trek II) was aware of the danger of lapsing into formulas and wrote in a “production diary” for TV Guide,

The more The Day After resembles a film, the less effective it is likely to be. No TV stars. What we don’t want is another Hollywood disaster movie with viewers waiting to see Shelley Winters succumb to radiation poisoning. To my surprise, ABC agrees. Their sole proviso: one star to help sell the film as a feature overseas. Fair enough.

Production proceeded without the cooperation of the U.S. Defense Department, which had wanted the script to make it clear that the Soviet Union started the war.

Despite sequences of cinéma vérité and occasional trappings of realism, the plot develops in soap opera fashion, with two families about to be united by marriage. The movie evolves, however, to present an image of a community of survivors that extends beyond the family, centered on what is left of the local university and based on the model of a medieval monastery.

Although November was a “sweeps” month, ABC decided to air no commercials after the point in the story in which the bomb fell. Even so, The Day After’s critics categorized the film as just another made-for-TV movie treating a sensational theme. Complained a New York Times editorial, “A hundred million Americans were summoned to be empathetically incinerated, and left on the true day after without a single idea to chew upon.” Other critics found the movie too tame in its depiction of the effects of nuclear attack (abroad, this was sometimes attributed to American naïveté about war), a reproach anticipated in the final caption, “The catastrophic events you have witnessed are, in all likelihood, less severe than the destruction that would actually occur in the event of a full nuclear strike against the United States.” Some critics did appreciate The Day After’s aesthetic ambitions. Since the program aired, no network has successfully attempted to match this hybrid between entertainment and information, between a popular genre like disaster and an address to the enlightened citizen.