AMERIKA : VIEWERS MAY BE FIGHTING RED YAWN INSTEAD OF RED MENACE

Finally!

America is about to learn for itself the awful, shocking truth concerning ABC’s pre-savaged marathon miniseries depicting a bleak and brutalized Soviet-ruled United States.

It turns out that “Amerika” is not merely Cold-Warring, Red-crunching and U.N.-thumping. It is not only political, simplistic, inflammatory, confrontational and potentially dangerous. Even worse, much of the nearly 15-hour “Amerika” is just plain boring.

The Red Yawn.

As someone noted recently, “Amerika” is so fast-paced, it doesn’t seem a minute over 13 hours.

Sunday’s premiere (from 9 to 11:20 p.m. on Channels 7, 3, 10 and 42) is the first of seven evenings of “Amerika,” of which only eight hours were available for previewing for this writing. It continues nightly through Friday, takes Saturday off and then concludes Feb. 22.

“Amerika” is bucking pressure groups and a trend against long miniseries. So ABC is hitting hard. A 412-page book version of “Amerika” is being released almost simultaneously with the miniseries. ABC has also distributed to schools an eight-page viewer’s guide on “Amerika,” with a list of suggested readings that includes the book version of the miniseries. And many ABC affiliates have chosen next week to run typically probing news reports on their own miniseries (“Special Assignment: ‘Amerika,’ the Controversial,” boomed Denver’s ABC station).

These self-serving minidocs may be more entertaining than the miniseries. You could fairly say that “Amerika” starts a tad slowly before hitting its, uh, stride, and that watching it demands patience and a touch of masochism.

Just hang in there. The first six hours are largely a drag, but in all fairness, Hour 7 is pretty snappy. Hour 8 is again a real crawl but, for all we know, those last 6 1/2 hours--knock on wood--just fly by.

“Amerika” begins in 1997, a decade after a spineless United States was conquered by the Soviet Union without a fight. It is now occupied by Kremlin-controlled U.N. forces.

This is not the shiny, brash, confident United States of today. Instead, the Midwest setting for “Amerika” recalls the drab, gray melancholy and despair of the Great Depression, a sort of Grapes of ABC’s Wrath, where Americans are forced to stand in line for food and to settle for soyburgers instead of hamburgers.

It’s a grim land where the Oval Office is occupied by a Soviet puppet, where the schools are Marxist, where “anti-social” behavior is corrected through electronic brainwashing, where political exiles are sent cross-country to live in dilapidated squatters’ camps.

The sadistic East German commander of the local peacekeeping force orders an attack on one of these defenseless camps. His Darth Vader-esque shock troops swoop like predators, their choppers buzzing low and their tanks squashing ramshackle buildings and people, even small children.

It’s a dingy and perilous life.

Few critics of the maligned and controversial “Amerika” would argue that life as a conquered Soviet subject is rich and carefree. What many of them do believe is that the fictional “Amerika” feeds U.S. paranoia by distorting Kremlin intentions (Do rational Soviets really have hopes of enslaving us?) and by pairing the story’s neo-United Nations with communism. The Soviet characters aren’t stereotypical, but their actions are.

Conservatives, on the other hand, have accused “Amerika” of being too soft on the Kremlin.

Whatever it is, this spectacle, written and directed by Donald Wrye, is not great literature or entertainment, even though it has its moments. You’d think that ABC could do better for its reported $41 million than a miniseries that is one of the the longest in network history, and possibly also the dreariest.

“Amerika” delivers mixed messages. It’s supposed to show “the triumph of the American spirit.” Yet the preponderance of Americans in the first eight hours are de facto collaborators, given only to occasional grumbling while passively accepting their fates.

The characters:

--Devin Milford (Kris Kristofferson). Heroic. Ran for President in 1988. Returning to his hometown of Milford, Neb., after six years imprisonment in an American gulag for being a resister. Determined to find his two sons, who are living with his collaborating ex-wife in Chicago. “If I could understand this man, I could understand America,” says a Soviet official about Devin. But alas, no one can understand Devin, probably least of all viewers. A very boring man played by a very boring actor.

--Peter Bradford (Robert Urich). Milford County administrator being groomed by the Soviets to become governor-general of the heartland. Means well, but tends to communicate in sanctimonious platitudes. Even his private thoughts become tedious, preachy lectures on patriotism.

--Amanda Bradford (Cindy Pickett). Peter’s wife and Devin’s former lover. Backs husband, but opposes collaboration. Looks tired, probably from listening to Peter. Nice performance by Pickett.

--Alethea Milford (Christine Lahti). Devin’s nonconformist sister who regularly sleeps with East German commander, but feels guilty about it. Most intriguing character in the story, played by outstanding actress able to rise above thin material.

--Col. Andrei Denisov (Sam Neill). Soviet “adviser” for Chicago-based Central Administration Area and the man manipulating Bradford. Smart, shrewd, sensitive, sleeping with American actress.

--Kimberly Ballard (Mariel Hemingway). Dippy actress and Andre’s American mistress. Tall. Blond. Heavy brows, light brain. Whines a lot. Totally unbelievable. You’ll love it when she joins the resistance. And Hemingway? Don’t ask.

--Marion Andrews (Wendy Hughes). Devin’s former wife. Now influential in Commie hierarchy. Sleeping her way to the top. Currently having serious fling with Soviet general. Despises Devin. Very nasty person.

--Ward Milford (Richard Bradford). Devin’s brother. Strong, solid character played by strong, solid actor.

--Will Milford (Ford Rainey). Devin’s father. At first resents Devin’s return, but then changes mind because it’s written that way in script. Typical good performance by Rainey, though.

--Helmut Gurtman (Reiner Schoene. Sneering, Nazi-like East German commander. Personification of evil. Sleeps with Alethea.

--Gen. Petya Samanov (Armin Mueller-Stahl). Andrei’s boss. Sleeps with Marion.

The creator:

That’s Wrye, who has repeatedly denied that his story about Soviet brutality is a story about Soviet brutality.

Wrye creates interesting moments, but is rarely able to sustain them. He shows flashes of craft, demonstrating a strong sense of motion and conflict, for example, in a stormy scene near the end of Part 1 wherein the Milfords have a family argument around the dinner table. That is skill.

Unfortunately, his thudding pace and passion for cheap, heavy-handed, manipulative sentiment intervene repeatedly. You can hardly believe his painfully extended scenes of survivors of the squatters’ camp attack limping into town as wet-hanky music booms in the background, practically imploring us to cry. Laughing comes easier.

Ditto much later, when Devin defies the law by sneaking into Chicago and locating his two sons. In a simply absurd sequence, he is turned in by his younger son, but holds off the cops while convincing his older son--who barely knows him--to immediately run off alone to join the resistance.

Is this the stuff of effective right-wing propaganda?

Wrye and ABC have essentially created a lightweight lark that speculates about the United States under Soviet totalitarianism. That doesn’t make them fascists or anti-Soviet hawks or conspirators against world peace.

“Amerika” does arrive with a Cold War point of view, though, at a time when U.S.-Soviet relations may be at a critical juncture regarding the nuclear arms race.

“Amerika” clashes with other, softer images of the Soviet Union projected by the Kremlin’s apparent liberalization policies at home. And there on TV last week was “Donahue,” with five segments taped in the Soviet Union, a remarkable bit of access for a U.S. television show.

Meanwhile, the satirical Plutonium Players of Berkeley may be putting all of this in the proper perspective by advocating a campaign of viewer ridicule in response to “Amerika.”

Why not “Rocky Horror Show”-type parties for watching “Amerika”? the Plutonium Players ask. So the group is distributing party kits that include an “Amerika” score sheet for counting such things as ideological messages and melodramatic music crescendos. The group also suggests costumes (“Come dressed as your favorite character. Internal exiles should look raggedy; collaborators should dress for success”) and holding a “Worst Soviet Accent” contest.

A svell idea, yes?