Once upon a time, great lumbering beasts roamed the media landscape, crushing everything in their path and scoring great returns during sweeps week. These beasts were known as miniseries, and in the 1980s they ruled television’s earth. Following the success of Roots in 1977, every network strove to catch lightning in a bottle again by spending a tremendous amount of money and programming time on televisual epics. These productions were typically aired on successive nights so that it was necessary for viewers to tune in to the same station for an entire week (or longer). Many miniseries were based on popular novels, or dramatized historical epochs (or both), and they were often touted as not only entertaining but Very Important.

In 1987, ABC took a gamble and broke from this formula, banking on a miniseries that was neither adapted nor historical, but instead set in a dystopian future. This had been successfully done before—V, a miniseries depicting an alien invasion of Earth, had been a huge hit for NBC years earlier—but ABC’s production opted for a nightmarish future that seemed a little more plausible. The miniseries was called Amerika. Its premise: What if the Soviet Union took over the USA?

This fear-mongering concept might seem a McCarthyite relic to the modern reader, but while US-Soviet relations had warmed somewhat by the time Amerika was in production (glasnost and perestroika had already entered the lexicon), a fear of communist subversion on our side of the Atlantic remained. In the wake of the leftist Sandinistas’ victory in Nicaragua in 1979, many right wingers insisted that nation could be used as HQ for fomenting communist revolutions throughout the hemisphere, or maybe even act as a beachhead for a future Russian invasion. Ronald Reagan made a nationally televised address in 1986 to warn his fellow Americans that Nicaragua was “only two hours’ flying time from our own borders” and that the Sandinistas would allow the Soviets to “become the dominant power in the crucial corridor between North and South America”, which is why the US needed to give the CIA-backed anti-communist Contra forces whatever aid they wanted. (And also why the US needed to fudge the question of who was the real threat to human rights in the region.)

Amerika generated immense controversy even before it aired. Liberal journals warned it would damage US-Soviet relations, and that appeared to be quite likely when Moscow threatened to retaliate by shutting down ABC’s Russian news bureau. The network aired a Nightline-style program addressing the uproar, hosted by Ted Koppel and featuring a live town hall forum. (The miniseries became so “serious” that of course David Letterman had to take multiple shots at its self importance.)

I was recently reminded of the existence of Amerika, and the memory brought back the fear young-me felt when it first aired. I did not watch the miniseries back then, but I did see commercials for it and was vaguely aware of the hubbub around it . The idea of Amerika scared me as a sub-10 year old because frightening the public was clearly the intent of its creators, as exemplified by this promo.

Having now watched Amerika, I can say there was nothing to fear from the miniseries apart from death by boredom—even minus commercials it runs an agonizing 12+ hours yet somehow feels twice as long. However, Amerika has certain perspectives on, for lack of a better word, Americans’ ideas of American-ness that may seem eerily familiar to the modern viewer.

The “what if” of an attempted Soviet takeover was not a novel plot device when Amerika aired. This hypothetical had been floated quite often since the beginning of the Cold War, most often in snarling reactionary fare and US government propaganda, though it was occasionally given Hollywood gloss. Sometimes these productions imagined a full-blown invasion or nuclear attack by the Soviets (as in Red Dawn), but no less common was the idea of communists conquering America via psychological warfare, undermining American institutions through media manipulation and sowing distrust in our cherished institutions. Amerika was a curious fusing of both concepts: in its imagined world, the Soviets occupied the US and controlled every aspect of life for its citizens, but they were able to maintain this hegemony largely because Americans had succumbed to bad vibes.

Amerika was a direct response to outcry from conservatives after an earlier ABC production: the 1983 made-for-TV movie The Day After, which imagined the horrifying aftermath of a US-Soviet nuclear exchange. The Day After was a huge critical hit and a ratings one as well, but the film took an unequivocal stance against the concept of nuclear deterrence, and that put it in the crosshairs of right wingers. Ever since the Yalta conference, it had been a conservative article of faith that the Soviets could only be cowed by the threat of mutual assured destruction, and any undermining of that concept was seen as tantamount to a white flag.

One op-ed by Ben Stein (yes, that Ben Stein) took ABC execs to task for the film’s presumed fifth column intentions and asked them to imagine “what life in the United States would be like if we lived under Soviet domination”. The execs did just that and decided a miniseries resting on this premise could be a sop to such criticism. Critics of the era recognized it as such; one called Amerika “a fourteen-hour public apology to the White House”.

There are many scenes and themes in Amerika that appear designed to appeal to the Ben Steins of the world. Set ten years after a Soviet takeover of the US, it depicts an America completely under the heel of communist oppression. Workers toil solely for Russia, which is extracting all of the country’s industrial capacity to prop up its own failed economy. The era of consumer plenty is over; at a proverbial Midwestern diner, a waitress tells patrons who ask for pancakes and syrup that the best she can offer is soybean cakes and molasses (anticipating the conservative anti-soy backlash by at least 20 years). Throughout the series, Americans are invariably huddled in raggedy winter coats or babushkas, suggesting both a dearth of material goods and an eternal winter of the soul. Citizens are routinely imprisoned for political reasons and subject to mind-destroying psychological experiments (shown as forced viewing of weird montages set to military music, swiped wholesale from A Clockwork Orange). If ever released, these political prisoners are forced to stay within rigid boundaries, camping outside in shacks and lean-tos and shunned as “squatters” by their fellow Americans.

The USA of Amerika has been divided into administrative areas policed by nefarious United Nations troops, who dress like Nazis and tend to speak Spanish, though they mostly scream it when bullying a local populace that has no means of fighting back because their guns have been seized. (Are these UN troops Cuban? Nicaraguan? Mexican? Let your mind wander to the most sinister possibility, Amerika suggests.) An early scene shows them deploying helicopters to fire on abandoned farmhouses, either for target practice or just for the sadistic symbolism. The occupying army bears an insignia out of a John Bircher’s worst nightmare: crossed US and Soviet flags over a UN shield.

What about the children? Many of them join a Komsomol-style youth organization called the Lincoln Brigades, which demands they sport red baseball caps and scarves, serve as insufferable nerd killjoys, inform on their parents, and regurgitate party dogma. (This seems another nod to the bleeding edge of the right wing; naming this group after the American volunteers who fought against fascists during the Spanish Civil War, thus implying that the real brigade of the 1930s was as evil as the imagined one of Amerika.) That dogma is fed to them in schools, where they are indoctrinated in history classes that are pictured as something that would inspire your most racist relative’s Facebook rants about CRT (though it’s hard to spot a lie in the below video that’s supposed to be sinister propaganda about American history).

Amerika is not exclusively a proto-Dinesh D’Souza production, however. The Soviets of its world did not conquer the USA through military might or psychological subterfuge. The miniseries is fuzzy on the finer details of the communist victory over America. Despite Amerika‘s stultifying length, which should give ample real estate in which to place exposition, the exact question of how the US fell to this lowly state is never definitively answered. (A lot of Amerika‘s important questions go unaddressed; more (or less) on that later.)

The closest we get to such an explanation is voiced by Soviet Colonel Andrei Denisov (Sam Neill, who delivers one of Amerika‘s better performances and its only credible Russian accent). Denisov is portrayed not as duplicitous commie scum, but a humane and sympathetic student of the now-defunct US, and so we’re meant to take it as the series’ thesis statement when he presents his theory to an American thusly:

You had political freedom but you lost your passion. You’ve become embarrassed of passion, of feeling strongly about anything. You never took an interest in the rest of the world, in understanding the rest of the world. You always saw things with your own vision. You wanted things to be right, by which you meant moral and democratic and your own way. So when you found yourself the most powerful country in the world, the only policy you could agree on was anti-communist. It was such a simplistic viewpoint. You began to miss the point of a lot of what was going on in the world. People who looked to America as an example for their own aspirations found themselves opposed by you because we supported them. One of the ways we were able to usurp the United Nations was because when the nations of the world rightly or wrongly began to perceive you as the problem you gave up. You took your ball and you went home. When there was a conflict in the world, you acted either as a strongman bending backwards for fear of offending someone or suddenly thrashing about wildly in some in some futile and foolish attempt to prove you were not weak. So ultimately you found yourselves…alone, feared, envied, hated. How could we not win?

Elsewhere, the cause of America’s downfall is presented in terms that rhetorically rhyme with Denisov’s speech: the US was subjugated because Americans forgot how to America, or didn’t America hard enough. Echoing a sentiment that was often voiced by liberal Cold Warriors, Amerika believes the best antidote to a utopian Marxist vision is for Americans to reclaim a sense of American-ness. The series’ creators said as much themselves in the aforementioned Ted Koppel-hosted forum, even though the studio audience and Koppel himself wondered why the military “how” of Soviet takeover was never addressed on screen.

The “let’s America harder” attitude is exemplified by Amerika‘s main focus, Devin Milford (played with preternatural stoicism by Kris Kristofferson), a Vietnam vet turned US senator who became a political prisoner after a failed presidential run. His campaign is mentioned throughout the series as both an inspiration to the troubled country and the final nail in the coffin of pre-occupation America, though the viewer is never clued in to either perspective beyond some archival footage that doesn’t sufficiently connect the dots. Released from prison at the series’ outset, Devin is resented by a father who blames him for the Soviet takeover and subsequent loss of the family’s farmland. Compounding his woes, he is unable to see his kids because his ex-wife is now a communist party official actively plotting to have him assassinated. (Insert divorce jokes here.)

And yet, Devin is still remembered fondly by many folks who resent the occupation, and he makes several attempts to capitalize on this fame to lead some variety of resistance movement, while also plotting to rescue his children from the grip of their seething collaborationist mother. In Spielbergian fashion, a small rebel group sees Devin’s singular quest to reunite with his brood as a resistance goal—a noble if confusing aim, which is perhaps why their plots to help him accomplish this are so baffling. One ploy involves surreptitiously flooding the toilets at his oldest son’s school a la Bart Simpson, then sending in Devin disguised as a plumber so he can meet the boy in the afflicted bathroom. His eldest child is rescued by the resistance, but Devin’s attempt to do the same for his youngest son is foiled when the boy, fully indoctrinated into the ways of new communist America, gives his father up to the authorities while screaming “KILL HIM! KILL HIM!” Devin escapes from the cops but is apprehended when another commie brainwashed 10-year-old pulls a gun on him. (Have I mentioned this series is weird? It’s weird.)

Despite the political and personal stakes, Devin resists the call of armed struggle. Throughout the series, resisters who resort to violence are portrayed as either fools employing bad tactics or agents provocateurs who actually serve the Soviets, and to Devin, a rifle is no match for schoolhouse recitation. When forced to “apologize” to the people in his town for his transgressions against the state, Devin instead leads them in a singing of the US’s old national anthem. Later, after he stands trial for the attempted kidnapping of his kids, he is given a public platform to speak by his Soviet accusers. (Why would the repressive Soviets allow this? Another question not sufficiently answered.) Devin eschews a speech in favor of leading the crowd in the Pledge of Allegiance, over and over again. This is presented as an inspiring moment of patriotism that will Yankee Doodle Dandy his fellow Americans into remembering their values, yet it comes across more like a madman’s repetition, an audio version of Jack Torrance tapping out “All work and no play…”

Devin’s weird yet uncompromising beliefs stand in contrast to those of Peter Bradford (Robert Urich), an administrator of a small Nebraska town. The Soviets tap the malleable Bradford to be the new governor general of a block of Midwestern states called Heartland, which are slated to be the first to secede from the United States. Moscow still fears the idea of America as a beacon of hope to the rest of the world, but believes an America carved into independent city-states will remove that hope. This tactic warrants further interrogation, but because Amerika gives it none, we’ll move on.

Bradford is portrayed as an honest and moral man, but he also believes Americans are no longer willing to sacrifice for their country—if they were, he voices on more than one occasion, the Soviets wouldn’t have taken over in the first place. He concludes the best thing he can do is work within the new Soviet system to minimize harm to Americans in his sector. This puts him on a collision course with Devin, as does their shared history: they grew up together, served in ‘Nam together, and were rivals for the woman who eventually became Bradford’s wife (Cindy Pickett, aka Ferris Bueller’s mom), who is seen teetering toward Devin as the two men’s differences come to a head.

Like many of Amerika‘s plot points, however, the love triangle is more hinted at than explored. This omission is curious because, again—I cannot emphasize this enough—this miniseries is extremely long and agonizingly slow. Good lord, is it slow. Perhaps the only thing slower than this miniseries is Andy Warhol’s Empire, and in making this comparison I’m going to lean very heavily on the word perhaps.

With so much time and at such a leisurely pace, you might think more of the nuts and bolts of this universe would be explained. You’d think wrong. To the contrary, Amerika seems to take pains to not answer the questions it continually raises, leaving the viewer feeling teased and malnourished. To appreciate the experience of watching Amerika, imagine a Hot Pocket the size of Cleveland, immense yet utterly void of narrative nutrition.

In place of exposition or exposition, the viewer gets:

• Repeated scenes of Denisov and other Soviets explaining the country to its own benighted citizens. Strap in for one longeur after another where some badly accented Russian condescendingly purrs “You Americans…” (Again, Neill’s accent is decent but the other Russians top out at “moose and squirrel” and most are much closer to “yeesh”.)
• Bradford’s daughter (a pre-Twin Peaks Lara Flynn Boyle) mooning over her dirtbag boyfriend, who attempts to flee the yoke of Soviet repression but gets blown up in a minefield and “rehabilitated” in a sadistic mental hospital. His plight is forgotten about for very long stretches of the series.
• Devin’s ex-wife canoodling with a Russian general and screaming at Denisov to find her oldest son, who fled with the resistance—a crusade that, like that of the missing dirtbag boyfriend, is forgotten about 3/5 of the way through the series and never picked up again.
• Devin’s firebrand sister (Christine Lahti) repeatedly raped and publicly humiliated by the local UN commander, who resembles a copy of a copy of Mads Mikkelsen.
• Random scenes in a resistance-friendly black church where the preacher speaks of running a new “Underground Railroad” against the Soviets. That this might be deeply offensive to the memory of the real underground railroad seems to not have occurred to Amerika‘s producers.
• Denisov’s mistress, an American actress (Mariel Hemingway), performing in an “outlaw” revue that satirizes the Soviet occupation with the subtlety of a sledgehammer, in a scene that goes on for roughly 9 years. If you’ve ever seen Studio 60, you’ll grasp the Sorkin-y tone of this painfully unfunny segment.
• A full showing of festivities around Lincoln Day, a Soviet-approved substitute for the Fourth of July, where the Khmer Rouge-like Lincoln Brigade kids march down Main Street bearing red banners with portraits of Marx and Lenin alongside The Great Emancipator. (Between this and the name of the brigades, what the hell did the producers of Amerika have against Lincoln?! Was this written by Stonewall Jackson?) When I say “a full showing,” I mean literally 20 minutes of unbroken film time, with footage of marching bands, majorettes, and all the other elements of a small town parade. Picture the St. Patrick’s Day parade on TV, but with red subbed in for green and even more boring. This scene was surely intended to evoke the uncanny terror of seeing the most profound symbols of American resolve appropriated for communist propaganda, but at this interminable length all the scene really evokes is the urge to take a nap.

And then, after dicking around for more than 10 hours, Amerika‘s final episode lunges into full “oh shit, I forgot I have a book report due tomorrow” mode. A Soviet overlord asks Congress to disband, which causes much yelling and grumbling on Capitol Hill. When they refuse, Russian paramilitaries posing as resistance fighters burst into the Senate chamber, murder all the lawmakers inside, and blow up the Capitol (in the process burning several portraits and destroying numerous statues of the Founding Fathers, in case anyone thought the mass murder of congressmen was too subtle). This false flag is part of the Soviets’ plan to divide the US into separate independent countries. If you’re wondering how this accomplishes that goal, do not search the text of Amerika for the answer; that way lies madness.

As for our protagonists, they are shuttled toward Amerika‘s haphazard attempt at denouement with the speed and grace of a runaway forklift. Devin survives an assassination attempt with the help of a sympathetic Denisov (why?), only to be placed in a psychiatric hospital for “behavior modification.” A mob of exiles, inspired by a recording of Devin reciting the Pledge of Allegiance (really?), descends on the hospital, allowing Devin to escape. Bradford’s wife exposes the evil psychiatric experiments going on there. (How?) Devin’s reluctance to take up arms goes out the window as he and a group of townspeople take on the evil UN troops, blow a bunch of shit up, and seize a local barracks. (But where did the townspeople’s guns and explosives come from?) Devin attempts to give a speech over a military comms line that will inspire further resistance. (Why? How? Zuh?) He and Bradford have a final confrontation in which Devin is killed. (Sneh?) The series ends with a simple pastoral funeral for Devin, and enough loose ends to make Lost look like Hop on Pop.

When the pre-release kerfuffle about Amerika had faded, ABC found their split-the-baby approach made no one happy. Liberals found it jingoistic, while conservatives thought it didn’t portray the Soviets as nearly ruthless enough (Neill’s Denisov in particular was a little too nuanced as a character to be godless commie sum in their eyes). It made a decent showing in the ratings, but among critics it went over like a lead balloon. TV Guide echoed the critical consensus when it called Amerika “arguably the most boring miniseries in a decade”.

Amerika quickly faded into obscurity. The series didn’t receive a VHS release until after the real Soviet Union had collapsed, and to the best of my knowledge it is not currently streaming on any service, major or minor. (The entire thing is available to watch on YouTube, for those who, like me, love to brutally waste their limited time on this planet.)

Despite all this, Amerika is instructive in its own blinkered way, because it demonstrates a prevailing belief in American exceptionalism that remains dominant on all sides of the political spectrum. It sidesteps completely the US’s military and financial domination of the world and instead projects the conviction that America The Idea is the reason for the nation’s power, both here and abroad. It also shares the quaking fear that this power can be undone if all of us don’t believe in it hard enough—the Tinkerbell Doctrine, if you will.

Today, this belief is equally prevalent among both MAGA types and the MSNBC crowd. For the modern conservative, who is a direct inheritor of the Reagan strain of right-wingery (no matter what Nancy Pelosi might say about it), this translates as a belief in a neo-herrenvolk who are the only people who truly understand America and have its best interests at heart. What those best interests might be are about as muddled as Amerika; the post-Trump conservative doesn’t have much faith or interest in traditional American institutions, political norms, or even history beyond cherry picking bits and pieces of it with which to cudgel their perceived enemies (liberal teachers, the media, trans people, or whatever combination of the above and more Tucker Carlson tells them to destroy this week). But in their minds, the oppressive Soviet world of Amerika is already in place because there are certain opinions they’re not “allowed” to express anymore. (Which ones? You know the ones.) Also, to this crowd, there is no more terrifying thought than going to a diner for pancakes and being told there is nothing but soy. If they believe in anything, it’s Cheesecake Factory fascism: fighting for the power to do whatever they want wherever they want and to whoever they want with zero consequences for themselves, forever.

On the other side, the remaining mainline liberals maintain a belief in the nation’s political institutions, though mostly as ideas, since the institutions themselves have rotted into obsolescence. These are the people who will tell you that our democracy is in a perilous state thanks to acts of Trump and his acolytes, that if we don’t act soon we may lose that democracy forever. But because they retain such faith in those institutions, any radical change is unthinkable, and any protest that might possibly upset someone somewhere is unacceptable. In the end, their prescription for our ailing republic is to “vote harder”—clap very hard if you believe in democracy—a close cousin of Amerika‘s call to save our nation by America-ing better.

This political landscape might seem nonnegotiable, but I too have a belief: That people of all convictions might be able to join together to view Amerika and, as its sweeping strings and amber waves wash over us all, speak with one voice the same words that headed David Letterman’s Top Ten List of questions about the miniseries: “What else is on?”