1983 American television film by Nicholas Meyer
The Day After is a 1983 American television film directed by Nicholas Meyer. The war film postulates a fictional conflict between NATO and the Warsaw Pact over Germany that rapidly escalates into a full-scale nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union. The action itself focuses on the residents of Lawrence, Kansas, and Kansas City, Missouri, and several family farms near American missile silos. The cast includes JoBeth Williams, Steve Guttenberg, John Cullum, Jason Robards, and John Lithgow. The film was written by Edward Hume and produced by Robert Papazian, with clips from the 1979 Air Force documentary First Strike used.
More than 100 million people, in nearly 39 million households, watched the film when it first aired on November 20, 1983, on the ABC television network. With a 46 rating and a 62% share of the viewing audience during the initial broadcast, the film was the seventh-highest-rated non-sports show until then, and in a 2009 Nielsen TV Ratings list was one of the highest-rated television films in US history.
The film was broadcast on Soviet state television in 1987, during the negotiations on Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. The producers demanded that the Russian translation conform to the original script and that the broadcast not be interrupted by commentary.
Plot summary adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.