‘Television Event’ Review: Thirty-Seven Years After ‘The Day After,’ a Documentary Looks Back at the ‘Citizen Nuke’ of TV-Movies

In the age of streaming, the phrase “TV-movie” has been rendered all but meaningless. It now encompasses everything from a Disney Channel musical like “Zombies 2” to “My Dinner with Hervé” to “Mank.” But 30 or 40 years ago, the phrase “TV-movie” meant something specific — a two-hour drama made for one of the big three networks (who were the only game in town), and it also meant a “movie” that had a certain cheesy overexplicit cardboard quality. Not to be a snob about it, but a TV-movie wasn’t cinema; it was…TV. (This was back when pointing that out wasn’t insulting an art form.)

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