Amazing episode of
The Americans this past week. It was obvious that Elizabeth felt terrible blackmailing Young Hee's husband by making him think they had an affair (the black-mailing part will presumably happen in a future episode).
Also liked the period music: Yaz's
Winter Kills (obscure but great), and Peter Schilling's iconic
Major Tom - perfect placement of this song in the episode.
And, I always like the attention to period details in the show - notably all of the VHS tapes in Young Hee's home
Here's a great re-cap of the episode:
‘The Americans’ Recap: Season 4, Episode 9, ‘The Day After’ - Speakeasy - WSJ
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Also, I can't emphasize enough how significant it was to show the characters watching
The Day After TV film (which aired on 11/20/1983). I was in middle school when it came out, and remember being pi$$ed that my overprotective parents wouldn't let me watch the entire film due to the graphic nature (I remember getting up to the point where Jason Robards & his daughter were in the museum). I wasn't happy about this at the time, but apparently other kids had the same experience; years later, I do remember mentioning this to a girl I was dating, and she was also prevented from watching this by her parents...
Years later, I did watch entire film on DVD. And, I found TDA an extremely disturbing, horrific, and graphic film - I'm actually surprised that it came out on network TV at the time, due to the nature of the story/effects - if it had been in the theater, I'm sure it would have been rated R. It definitely seemed more like a big-budget, expensive Hollywood film than a TV movie.
This film did a good job of depicting what may have happened had there been a catastrophe like this back in the day; the scenes of people being incinerated in the blast(s) were quite chilling; also horrible were the scenes of destruction, & the bodies - especially the ones that had been flash-fried/charred but still intact -were quite grotesque. However, what really got me were the scenes of people dying of radiation poisoning - truly unerrving & horrific.
I felt the story was quite well-done as well, and understandably focused on those who were in the mid-west at the time (near the missle silo). I was also surprised that this tele-film had a lot of "big names", even by '83 standards - i.e. Jason Robards, Jobeth Williams, Steve Guttenberg - IIRC, all of them had been in feature films in the '70's and/or '80's. So, I was surprised they were in a TV movie.
This was definitely an anti-war film, though at the time I didn't realize this...
It's also worth noting that the film-makers put a caveat at the end of the film - stating that if something like this were to happen, it would be much worse than what was depicted on-screen.
In closing, I'm probably glad I never saw this as a kid - it may have given me nightmares. Plus, the threat of n. war in the '80's was huge, and so the possibility of this happening was at the forefront of everyone's mind at the time.
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