Amerika

ANYONE WHO has read a newspaper or magazine during the last few weeks knows that Amerika threatens to slant this country's perceptions of the Soviets and contribute to the xenophobia of our allegedly tolerant society.

Of course anyone who has sat through a few of the 14 1/2 hours of the demented fantasy knows that it doesn't do any of those things. Amerika's promoters bill the show as a depiction of American life in 1997, 10 years after a bloodless Soviet coup. Yet on the tube, the show is more of an intimate look at the personal lives of Milford, Nebraska's hard-driven, over-sexed residents. In one of its most subtle political commentaries so far, the show depicts--from a variety of salacious angles--the hips of Robert "Spenser: for Hire" Urich's daughter, as she tries out for a Soviet ballet troop and earns an admonition from a stern Russian: the time has passed when "undisciplined gyrations were considered self-expression"

Why are we watching this schlock? Because it's a glitzed-up version of the trashy garbage Americans watch every week anyway. So why, then, are people so worked up about Amerika?

Why did America become a nation of slaves in the first place? The Russians took over without firing a shot, it is explained. But how? The show implies the answer has something to do with a crisis of American will. "You lost before we even got here," the head Russian tells Spenser. But the show hasn't gone any further in answering this all-important question in its first six hours.

Amerika can't be taken seriously. It shouldn't be. That the United Nations is threatening to sue ABC for "misuse" of its logo only lends legitimacy to the network's racist tripe. The shrill indignation of the show's critics has the same effect. Post-episode forums on the show's "significance," which draw on "experts" whose expertise is just a wisp below the Phil Donahue standard, don't help either.

Those calling for time to run "counter-programming" only further the dangerous impression that Amerika's farcical mix of geopolitical and romantic drama deserves to be taken seriously. Predictably, the most appropriate response to this explosive drama is a yawn.