From "The Day After" to "Paradise": ATX Takes a Look at Nuclear Storylines on TV
Nuclear war has been reliable TV drama for over 40 years. An ATX Festival panel titled "A Nuclear Renaissance on TV," presented by the Nuclear Threat Initiative and moderated by NTI CEO Christine Wormuth, traced that lineage from 1983's The Day After through today's Paradise, The Diplomat, and Madam Secretary. Director Nicholas Meyer (The Day After), Paradise writer/producer Nadra Widatalla, The Diplomat's Peter Noah, and Madam Secretary's David Grae all spoke to how their shows handled nuclear stakes, and how much (or how little) institutional appetite there was to tell those stories in the first place.
Paradise (Hulu)
Paradise Writer/Producer Nadra Widatalla said the writers didn't set out to tell a nuclear story. Showrunner Dan Fogelman initially wanted the show's apocalypse to be a climate disaster (the "Caldera"), not nuclear war, but consultants convinced them nuclear war was the realistic downstream consequence: once resources collapse, land grabs and power struggles among world leaders make it inevitable. That became the season-one finale, "The Day." The show's invented EMP kill-switch, which President Cal Bradford ultimately uses to disable nuclear weapons rather than retaliate, traces back to a writers'-room story from producer John Hoberg's grandfather, a WWII pilot who'd worked on developing the nuclear football and described a red/blue card system. The team was deliberate about making Bradford's choice not be written as "what a president would do" but as what a father, husband, and friend would do; character over procedure.
Offering a bit of a look ahead, Widatalla teased a Season 3 space storyline. The team brought in a real Artemis-program astronaut as a consultant, but eventually had to overrule his notes on zero-gravity accuracy for the sake of drama. Elijah Wood joins the cast as an astronaut.
Scandal (ABC)
While mostly present to talk about Netflix’s The Diplomat, Peter Noah served as a writer/producer on Season 2 of ABC’s Scandal. He recalled thinking he was hired because he had previously worked on The West Wing and had expertise in political realism, but quickly realized that wasn't the assignment. The job that materialized was writing the episode where the President of the United States strangles a Supreme Court justice.
The Day After (ABC before Disney)
On November 20th, 1983, ABC aired The Day After, which became one of the most-viewed TV movies in history. Director Nicholas Meyer recalled the internal drama at ABC over the production, which only got made because ABC Entertainment President Brandon Stoddard believed so strongly in the film that he threatened to resign if the network didn’t produce it.
Meyer recounted his guiding idea was that nobody wants to think about nuclear war, so the film had to work like a "public service announcement" smuggled in as a TV movie rather than as prestige drama. He deliberately avoided big award-bait performances because he didn't want audiences talking about craft instead of absorbing the message. ABC, he said, "hated it from the beginning," fully expecting (correctly) to lose every sponsor. The Pentagon offered full cooperation on one condition: that the film show the Russians starting the war. Meyer's team turned it down and made it independently. They also clashed with ABC's own scientists over whether an electromagnetic pulse from an airburst would fry electronics; the network said there was no such effect, Meyer's side disagreed and included it anyway.
All of this happened under ABC as an independent network, over a decade before Capital Cities/ABC was acquired by Disney in 1996, which is part of why the special could be this uncompromising: no in-house sponsor to protect, no studio parent to answer to, and a network that actively fought the project rather than championing it. The film ended up the most-watched TV movie ever (Meyer cited figures ranging from 100–150 million viewers) and, by his account, didn't change the general public's mind per post-air surveys, but it did change one person's: Reagan, who later signed the INF Treaty with Gorbachev at Reykjavik. Meyer noted attempts to remake or update the concept for streaming have gone nowhere; nobody wants to fund something like it today the way ABC (reluctantly, under threat of an executive's resignation) once did.
The Diplomat (Netflix)
Peter Noah described the Poseidon submarine storyline, a real Russian nuclear torpedo/drone designed to evade missile defenses and trigger a radioactive tsunami, as emerging almost by accident, out of trying to make a new boyfriend character seem "cool," which snowballed into an actual apocalypse-weapon plot teased for season four this October. He also talked about leaning on a network of West Wing-era DC contacts as consultants, and about how much harder it's become to write political fiction now that, in his words, "truth is too implausible for fiction."
Madam Secretary (CBS)
David Grae traced the "Night Watch" nuclear-hair-trigger episode to a writers'-room visit from real-life Energy Secretary Ernie Moniz, and described leaning on nuclear expert Bruce Blair for procedural accuracy down to how the president's launch order actually gets executed. He highlighted a scene in which Secretary McCord is told she's "being emotional" during a nuclear policy debate and turns it to her advantage, which resonated with moderator Wormuth's own experience as Army Secretary. He also noted CBS's one hard no was a North Korea episode (post-Sony-hack nerves), while everything else, including a Section 4/25th Amendment episode during the first Trump term, got made.
Taken together, the panel underlined how much a network's ownership and appetite for risk shapes what nuclear stories get told. The Day After only exists because an ABC executive was willing to threaten his own job for it, at a network with no corporate parent to answer to and every incentive to walk away. Scandal, made under the Disney-owned ABC of the 2010s, could still hand a West Wing alum the assignment of writing a president strangling a Supreme Court justice. And Paradise, now streaming on Hulu, shows the same instinct persisting under Disney's current umbrella: writers reaching for real nuclear history and real experts, then overriding them when the story needs a human moment instead of a procedural one. Four decades and several ownership changes later, the panelists' shared takeaway was less about the technology of nuclear weapons than about who gets to decide, and what it costs a network or a studio to let that decision play out honestly on screen.