Amerika, and More Mrs. Grenvilles

TELEVISION

For six nights this month, Soviet forces will occupy most of ABC's prime-time schedule. Amerika, the network's $35 million, twelve-hour mini-series about life in the Midwest ten years after a Russian takeover, will be unavoidable—indeed, the warm winds of commentary have already begun to pollute the atmosphere. But the show promises to be much funnier than the outraged editorials, even if the producers didn't mean it to be. They've made a Reefer Madness for the eighties. Amerika is a right-wing cartoon in the Rambo/Red Dawn mode; it makes you wonder if maybe Jesse Helms got himself a network after all. How did the Russians pull it off? It seems that by the late 1980s we had grown so self-centered, strung out, and pacific that they scarcely had to fire a shot. ("The only people willing to wear a uniform were the elevator operators.") Occupation bums out everyone but Mariel Hemingway and Wendy Hughes, who go for the rough sex and expensive clothes dispensed by Soviet commanders. For everybody else, it means perpetual winter, standing on line for tomatoes, and soybean products instead of Aunt Jemima pancakes ("That's what really makes you want to give up. You can't get a good breakfast"). Fortunately for all of us, Kris ("Do you think it's possible to kill an idea, General?") Kristofferson is doing his craggy, Lincolnesque best to save the Republic.

MICHAEL POLLAN

I his month, Ann-Margret and Claudette Colbert claw it out as ex-show girl Ann Grenville and her stately mother-in-law in the two-part mini-series The Two Mrs. Grenvilles, yet another incarnation of the famous 1955 so-

ciety scandal-murder. Ann Woodward's "accidental" shooting of her husband after a party for the Duchess of Windsor—she thought he was a prowler—inspired Truman Capote's "La Cote Basque, 1965" and Dominick Dunne's bestselling novel, on which the series is based. Most interesting is the casting—Colbert was a good friend of matriarch Elsie Woodward. Nothing like living your friend's life.

AMY ENGELER