END OF ‘AMERIKA’ DREAM: DISAPPOINTMENT AND DRAMA : Despite Pace, There Were Parts to Remember in ABC Miniseries

By popular demand, one more column about “Amerika.”

The second half of “Amerika” was almost as slow as the first half. And Sunday’s concluding episode was a disappointing klunker.

Yet portions of this uneven, oft-ridiculed and attacked ABC miniseries--specifically Friday’s two hours--were as powerful as anything made for TV--ever.

The more you watched--if you could survive the preaching and the long, arid stretches--the more you found yourself drawn in and converted. The conversion was not to an ideology of right or left, but to a frame of mind, a sort of state of suspended reason.

Once you bypassed the fictional premise that the Soviets could easily conquer the United States and then rule here through United Nations surrogates, almost everything else fell into place.

Some viewers probably saw in “Amerika” a Soviet blueprint for enslaving the United States. That plan seemed far-fetched, if not inconceivable in this Nuclear Age, even though Soviet communism is by definition expansionist, Gorbachev or no Gorbachev, glasnost or no glasnost.

Essentially, “Amerika” told us only what we already knew:

--Most Americans take their liberties and constitutional guarantees for granted. When more of us watch the Super Bowl on TV than vote in a national election, something’s askew somewhere. You can bet “Amerika” won’t change that , but if it does, ABC Entertainment President Brandon Stoddard and executive producer/writer/director Donald Wrye will have earned a ticker-tape parade.

--The diverse Soviet peoples are basically decent. It’s communism--as brutally executed by the Soviet Union and others--that stinks.

What “Amerika” didn’t suggest--and should have--is that the Soviets of 1987 are surely just as fearful and suspicious of us as we are of them.

In a curious way, the Soviet “people” were metaphorically represented in “Amerika” not by civilian characters but by the two top-ranking Soviet military officials in the Kremlin-ruled America. Both eventually were repulsed and disillusioned by their own part in the ultimate savagery of the occupation, one of them to the point of committing suicide.

Gen. Petya Samanov (Armin Mueller-Stahl), immediately after directing the mass assassination of Congress and the destruction of the Capitol in Friday’s segment, took his own life because he couldn’t face what he had done and become.

This entire sequence, including the distraught Samanov haunted by the carnage and almost stumbling among the dead in a semi-hallucinatory state, was simply extraordinary TV, a widening of the small screen to panoramic vistas of horror and degradation.

The episode ended with Col. Andrei Denisov (Sam Neill) in despair about the mass murders. Like a child suckling its mother, he phoned his American ex-mistress, Kimberly Ballard (Mariel Hemingway), for comfort and begged her to sing “Try to Remember,” the tender tune from “The Fantasticks” that she had performed in outlaw theater. As she sang this time, slowly and haltingly (“Try to remember . . . the kind of September when life was slow and oh so mellow. . .”), he hung up, as if lowering a shade on his own life. At that moment, Denisov was as dead as the murdered members of Congress.

What exquisite bits of acting, first by Mueller-Stahl and then by Neill, with nice support by Hemingway, and what writing and shaping by Wrye. TV doesn’t get any better than this.

The Mueller-Stahl and Neill sequences were two of three that made Friday memorable. In the third, a pleading Ward Milford (Richard Bradford), a stoical Will Milford (Ford Rainey) and a seething Alethea Milford (Christine Lahti) watched their century-old farmhouse torched by occupation troops. Such intensity--and crushing sadness.

Not the stuff of golden ratings.

ABC’s reported $41-million investment in “Amerika” did not yield the kind of Nielsens the network had envisioned. TV critics are notorious for double standards when it comes to ratings. We rap TV for using them as their barometer of success, then gloat when poor ratings seem to validate our judgments, as in “Amerika.”

Well, there was a lot about “Amerika” to dislike. That includes the lack of a single, sustaining vision by Wrye, who was expert at creating shades and moods with faces and music in “Amerika,” but not in spinning connecting threads.

Many viewers probably tuned out in part because of the often lumbering pace and the crippling presence of Kris Kristofferson, who was unable to live up to the fire and charisma of “Amerika” hero Devin Milford. Would anyone really have followed this man to the death? Watching the absurd resistance fighters follow Devin in Sunday’s foolish and muddled finale was like seeing a military revolt led by Jimmy Carter. Not much oomph or credibility.

And why was it necessary to shoot and kill Devin to stop him from delivering a radio message? Why not merely shoot his transmitter or just drag him away?

Meanwhile, the debate about the intent and politics of “Amerika” still festers. That was clear from Monday night’s “Viewpoint” program on ABC that matched the makers and some of the critics of “Amerika” in a forum that the network scheduled only under pressure.

Bruce Herschensohn gave his own judgment on KABC-TV Channel 7 Sunday night. All of Los Angeles must have breathlessly awaited his verdict on whether a real-life “Amerika” could really happen. He said it could--and that those questioning the premise of “Amerika” were surely “accommodators and appeasers.” Why not plain old Red agents?

In the smallish world of “The Fantasticks,” by the way--in contrast to the extravagant ambivalence of “Amerika”--love and wisdom ultimately prevail:

Deep in December, it’s nice to remember:

Without a hurt the heart is hollow.

Deep in December, our hearts should remember,

And follow.”