On November 20, 1983, ABC aired a TV movie that made headlines before most people even had a chance to see it. The Day After depicts the events of a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union from the perspective of residents in the American Midwest. Directed by Nicholas Meyer, a novelist turned filmmaker who’d recently helmed Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, The Day After attracted controversy for its graphic violence—including a terrifyingly believable bombing scene in the middle of the film—and its perceived antinuclear messaging.
Meyer did nothing to discourage the perception that his film about the horrors of nuclear war might have an antinuclear war slant, describing The Day After in an interview as “a giant public service announcement, like Smokey the Bear,” and leaking the film to antinuclear activists before it aired. Other early viewers included none other than Ronald Reagan, who wrote that the film left him “depressed” and seemingly inspired him to reconsider his approach to the Cold War. In “The Day After,” a fourth-season episode of The Americans, the series depicts the night of the movie’s broadcast as a moment in which the nation froze in horror as it watched. As usual, it was a case of the show being true to historical details.
In an era when a TV movie could be a really big deal, none was bigger than The Day After. But it’s not like The Day After was the lone TV movie that started a cultural conversation or attracted a lot of viewers. The mid-’80s might have marked the high point for the made-for-television movie, but the form thrived in the years before and after The Day After reminded everyone how close we were to nuclear annihilation.
The most notable TV movies of the 1970s included Brian’s Song and Duel, which provided breakthrough moments for James Caan and Billy Dee Williams (Brian’s Song) and Steven Spielberg (Duel). The ’90s saw, among other developments, HBO coming into its own via ambitious, high-profile efforts like And the Band Played On and The Josephine Baker Story. Not all made-for-television films were so prestigious, however. To find reasons for TV movies’ second-tier reputation, look no further than the 1992-93 stretch that produced three competing versions of the Amy Fisher story. But, good or bad, TV movies could be found in abundance. What’s more, viewers understood what they were and where to watch them.
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And now? What exactly is a TV movie in an era when the major networks have mostly exited the business of making them, leaving the format largely in the hands of streaming services? The answer is refreshingly clear when it comes to Mountainhead, Jesse Armstrong’s original film created for HBO that’s set to debut on May 31, when it will also appear on Max (the streaming service soon to once again be known as HBO Max). Beyond the fact that the film will air on a conventional cable network, Mountainhead feels properly scaled to the size of a TV movie and in the tradition of what’s worked on TV before.
Armstrong, who created and show-ran Succession to enormous acclaim, sets Mountainhead almost entirely within the luxurious, mountainside home of one of the four central characters who spend most of the film bantering and fighting with one another in dialogue-driven scenes. (Sound familiar?) It’s funny and well-acted—which isn’t particularly surprising given its creator and a cast that includes Steve Carell, Jason Schwartzman, Cory Michael Smith, and Ramy Youssef—and it looks good. But it also never plays like a movie intended to be seen in a theater. It’s smaller and more focused in ways that emphasize what television does well: character-driven stories that take advantage of a more limited scope to explore complex relationships and meaningful themes in a more intimate setting. (That’s true even of seeming exceptions. Game of Thrones built epic battle sequences on the foundation of its character work, not the other way around.) Often it’s the space of TV series’ multiple episodes that allows television to do this, but the best TV movies find ways to port these qualities into movie-length running times.) And though it’s hard to see any movie becoming a part of the cultural conversation the way The Day After did, Mountainhead’s story of tech titans callously reshaping the world from a great distance aligns it with topical TV movies of the past.
This points to a TV movie tradition that’s continued even as TV movies have become increasingly scarce in the places they once thrived. Mountainhead’s appearance on HBO serves as a reminder that even though the network no longer turns out made-for-television films at the clip it used to, it’s never abandoned them either. TV movies have continued to thrive elsewhere, too. Just as traditional sitcoms found more hospitable environments on the Disney Channel and Nick at Nite when laugh tracks went out of style, cable networks like Lifetime and the Hallmark Channel have continued to turn out modestly budgeted TV movies filled with telegenic stars.
As to why TV movies have faded on network television, the change, like most 21st-century changes to the TV landscape, can be attributed to the ascent of streaming services. But rather than putting a stake through the heart of traditional TV movies, streamers have had to reckon with what made those movies viable in the first place. Just as series like The Pitt, Poker Face, and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds have shown how much life is left in time-tested episodic formats, recent developments in the TV movie world have confirmed there’s space for films that play best at home.
This has required a period of transition. A look at recent Emmy nominations provides a sense of the bigger story. It didn’t take long after streaming’s emergence for it to make its presence felt in the Outstanding Television Movie category. Netflix first competed in the category in 2016 via A Very Murray Christmas, a Sofia Coppola–directed riff on Christmas specials, starring Bill Murray. Netflix’s first win came the following year for an episode of Black Mirror that barely broke the 60-minute mark (“San Junipero”). Black Mirror installments would win in the category for the next two years (and inspire the Television Academy to specify that TV movies must be at least 75 minutes long to qualify), but in the 2020s, both winners and nominees have started to look more like evolved strands of traditional TV movies. Winners have included HBO’s sharp, fact-inspired Bad Education (which the network picked up from the Toronto International Film Festival but feels of a piece with HBO originals); the Hulu comedy Quiz Lady; the Roku Channel’s Weird: The Al Yankovic Story; Chip ’n Dale: Rescue Rangers, a self-aware Disney+ revival of an once beloved after-school favorite, directed by Akiva Schaffer; and Dolly Parton’s Christmas on the Square, a Netflix premiere that’s the most old-fashioned of the bunch.
Two qualities unite these winners, many of their fellow nominees, and much of what makes up the world of TV movies in the middle of the 2020s. Each represents a type of film that rarely, if ever, plays in movie theaters anymore—comedies and mid-budget dramas chief among them. (And sometimes they come from genres that do: It still seems baffling that Prey, an excellent offshoot of the Predator franchise, debuted on Hulu.) Yet it wouldn’t be sufficient to define TV movies as simply whatever theatrical movies aren’t. Mountainhead reminds us that TV movies, as opposed to movies that happen to be showing on television, share a compactness, as if they were made to fit into the size of a living room, even if most have upgraded from the drab sets associated with the heyday of TV movies.
Maybe TV movies are akin to singles; hit songs no longer need to fit within the time constraints of a 45 RPM record, yet most still could. Sometimes restrictions help create traditions and expectations, which helps explain why would-be blockbusters like The Electric State barely make an impression while a modestly sized comedy like Nonnas thrives. TV movies haven’t so much vanished in the decades after The Day After as they have evolved. True TV movies have stayed small. It’s just the TV screens that have gotten bigger.
This post originally stated that Robert De Niro appeared in Brian's Song. James Caan and Billy Dee Williams starred in that film, not De Niro.
