Amerika starred Kris Kristofferson, Mariel Hemingway, Sam Neill, Robert Urich, Christine Lahti, and a 17-year-old Lara Flynn Boyle in her first major role.

[1] Not wanting to depict the actual takeover, ABC Entertainment president, Brandon Stoddard, set the miniseries ten years after the event, focusing on the demoralized U.S. people a decade after the Soviet conquest.

Described in promotional materials as "the most ambitious American miniseries ever created", Amerika aired for 14+1⁄2 hours (including commercials) over seven nights (beginning February 15, 1987), and reportedly cost $40 million to produce.

Donald Wrye was the executive producer, director, and writer of Amerika, while composer Basil Poledouris scored the miniseries, ultimately recording (with the Hollywood Symphony Orchestra) eight hours of music – the equivalent of four feature films.

[1] Amerika has an indirect connection to another notable ABC program, the 1983 television film The Day After, which some critics felt was too pacifist for portraying the doctrine of nuclear deterrence as pointless.

Stoddard cited a column in the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner by Nixon speechwriter (and later, television personality) Ben Stein that appeared a few weeks before The Day After aired.

Stein wrote, in part: since my dear friends at ABC-TV have made a TV movie very rightly describing the terror of an atomic attack on America, perhaps they might consider something else.

Denisov hopes to "salvage as much as possible" of the old U.S., while realizing that the U.S. essentially must cease to exist as a nation in order to appease the Soviet Union's leadership.

The Soviet leaders of the occupation are faced with the dual problem of keeping the U.S. pacified and convincing the Politburo that their fears of a revitalized U.S. are unfounded because the country can no longer pose a threat.

At great personal risk, Petya Samanov convinces the Soviet leadership in the Kremlin in Moscow to accept an agreeable compromise plan.

Either by a court of law or by a Soviet military tribunal being appointed by the Central Committee in Moscow making a strenuous journey to travel to the former U.S. capital city to preside over such a trial.

Under strict instructions to Samanov by Moscow, the planned operation will only be carried out if the United States Congress refuses to agree to dissolve the nation's government, disperse, and go home in peace.

In this fictional timeline, the U.S. Congress divided the United States into multiple Soviet occupied "administrative areas" in 1988, one year after the communist takeover.

Alaska is described as never having been pacified, requiring continued engagement by Soviet troops, and there are pockets of armed resistance in the Rocky Mountains and in West Virginia.

Both the novel and miniseries imply that the Soviet Union has conquered other countries after the U.S. coup (it can be surmised, for example, that the EMP which disabled U.S. technology also would have crippled Canada and Mexico, a minor character says that he and his wife fled East Germany for the United States and remarked that "the promised land [had] become worse than what [they] left", and Denisov says at one point that "we control most of the world").

In this new world, Fidel Castro heads what is now called "Greater Cuba", embracing most of the Caribbean and Latin America, and Taiwan has been absorbed into China.

[6][1] Certain critics and viewers felt it was too long and unrealistic, others argued that it would be damaging to Soviet-American relations, and a spokesperson for the United Nations objected to it being portrayed as an occupying force under Soviet control.

[7][8] Some conservatives felt that Soviet brutality was greatly underplayed; conversely, a number of liberals dismissed the entire miniseries as right-wing paranoia.

[9] Prior to the show's airing, several left-wing magazines, including The Nation, The Progressive, Tikkun and Mother Jones carried articles strongly criticizing Amerika.

[8] Journalist Christopher Hitchens, when encouraged by a caller on a February 1987 C-SPAN talk show to view the series, commented "I bet you you don't get through to the end of it.

[14] After seeing the first episode and reading the shooting script, Tom Engelhardt stated that Amerika had "a plot line that makes suspension of disbelief into an act of grace.

"[8] In its summary of the 1986–87 US television season, TV Guide called the miniseries "arguably the most boring miniseries in a decade", adding that "ABC's Amerika tried to hold America hostage for seven tedious nights (and a stupefyingly dull 14+1⁄2 hours) by conjuring up a fuzzy vision of a Communist occupation of the U.S."[15] Although it aired only two years before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, Amerika implied that American apathy and an unwillingness to defend freedom on the part of many citizens made the Soviet takeover rather easy.

"[17]: 217 The miniseries' depiction of the takeover of the USA by a communist authority mirrored occurrences in Nicaragua, helping to spur organizations such as the Freedom Federation into launching its own media campaign – along with William F. Buckley of the National Review and the Wall Street Journal – which used the film "as a pretext to persuade the public that the United States needed to continue its support of right-wing governments in Central America by aiding the Contras.

[18] Although a 35 share reportedly had been promised to advertisers, Stoddard was happy with the performance of Amerika, claiming that all or part of the miniseries had been watched by 100 million people – a ratings bonanza for ABC, then in third place among the three major networks.

In February 1987, the miniseries was parodied on the NBC show Saturday Night Live as "Amerida", in which a debt-ridden United States is mortgaged to Canada and subsequently repossessed.

[19] The satirical Canadian radio program Double Exposure parodied the series in a sketch called Kanada with a K, in which "Joe Klark with a K" rescues the nation from "Comrade Ed".