HBO's Most Devastating Miniseries Will Haunt You

The Big Picture

• HBO's Chernobyl is a devastating miniseries that focuses on the catastrophic nuclear incident, highlighting the dangers of government secrecy and negligence.
• The series deconstructs the incident from subatomic levels to the decision-making process of the Soviet government, showcasing the consequences and efforts made by various characters.
• Chernobyl serves as a haunting reminder of the consequences of ignoring technical and scientific expertise in crisis prevention, pointing to parallels in our current world.

HBO shows are mostly known for leaving the audience affected by their character-driven narratives. But the network's most devastating miniseries is the starkest example, as it tells a very compelling — and real — story in which the focus isn't on the characters at all, but rather on a catastrophic event. The 2019 miniseries Chernobyl, created by Craig Mazin, follows the events and the aftermath of the infamous nuclear incident at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in 1986, tracking main character Valery Legasov (Jarred Harris) as he's forced to navigate the inescapable bureaucracy of the Soviet government while investigating the causes of the incident and how to prevent it from happening again. Legasov's conclusions, however, aren't tied only to the Soviet government, and act as a dark omen of many things happening in our world.

Chernobyl

In April 1986, an explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics becomes one of the world's worst man-made catastrophes.

In ‘Chernobyl,’ Every Narrative Revolves Around the Disaster

It's easy and rather comfortable to think nowadays that the Chernobyl accident had its roots in Soviet bureaucracy and that it couldn't happen in the West. That's still a Cold War-era mentality lingering on even decades after its end, trying to work with the notion that someone "won" it. It's also easy to blame it solely on human error when the roots of the problem are much, much deeper. The best thing Chernobyl does is to show exactly that, deconstructing everything related to the incident from subatomic levels (literally) to the decision-making process of the Soviet government.

We follow everything through the eyes of a few key characters who relate to the incident in different ways. Valery Legasov is the nuclear scientist recruited by the government to investigate and help mitigate the effects of the incident, Boris Shcherbina (Stellan Skarsgård) is the bureaucrat sent to coordinate the efforts on the scene, Anatoly Dyatlov (Paul Ritter) is the button-pusher at the plant control room, Lyudmila Ignatenko (Jessie Buckley) is a Pripyat inhabitant whose husband Vasily (Adam Nagaitis) is a first-responder, and Ulana Khomyuk (Emily Watson) is a Belarus scientist who discovers how far into Central Europe the effects of the incident can go. Of course, all of them have a starting point and a conclusion in the series' narrative, but there's barely any character journey to be found here; it's all about how they react to the disaster. Legasov, Shcherbina, and Khomyuk do form a "main trio" of sorts, but there's barely anything special about their relationship dynamics other than the fact that they are completely focused on helping each other solve the crisis at hand.

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It's the story of the most severe nuclear accident since Chernobyl in 1986.

Most of what we see is through Legasov's eyes, though, as he's the closest to a main character that Chernobyl has. He's the stereotypical scientist possible: he has an awkward demeanor, but a very didactic approach to his job at the incident site. His explanations are always clear, but, just as happens in the real world, are often contested by men who are more concerned with other aspects of the crisis rather than how the technical one may impact their job. In the series, this includes Mikhail Gorbachev (David Dencik), the leader of the USSR, who patronizes Legasov in a meeting scene in Episode 2, "Remain Calm," and only after the professor refuses to let a meeting be adjourned and listens to reason. In a later meeting, he has a sort of childish disbelief when Legasov mentions that the combination of chemicals formed "a kind of lava" that will explode in around 48 hours. "You have made lava?" is the question Gorbachev asks. Shortly after, Legasov and Khomyuk also explain that they need three Chernobyl workers to solve this issue, but that they'll be dead in a week due to radiation. Gorbachev then proudly allows these comrades to be sacrificed, as if he were a general in war.

All this culminates in a brilliant trial scene in Chernobyl's finale, "Vichnaya Pamyat" (which is Ukrainian for "Memory Eternal"). Chernobyl deputy chief engineer Anatoly Dyatlov, plant manager Viktor Bryukhanov (Con O'Neill), and chief engineer Nikolai Fomin (Adrian Rawlins) are put on trial for the incident, and Legasov delivers the key testimony. He explains everything that happened to cause the incident, from chemical reactions to budgetary decisions made upon building the nuclear plant. One of the most shocking moments in his testimony is when the judge asks him why the plant was built in such a careless and dangerous fashion, and Legasov answers: "Because it's cheaper." Moments later, Legasov explains that the Chernobyl technicians did create the circumstances that led to the nuclear meltdown at the plant, but they didn't know how to properly operate it because that was kept from then, all the way from the top of the Soviet state. That's when Legasov says of TV's most accurate and haunting lines of the last decade: "Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid." That's enough to make any viewer who reads the news shudder.

‘Chernobyl’ Shows How Dangerous Government Secrecy Can Be

The fact that every character narrative in Chernobyl revolves around the incident allows it to have multiple fronts that sprawl outward. Not all of these storylines connect, but they're all tied to the main event. That's the case with Pavel Gremov (Barry Keoghan). He's a liquidator, people who were drafted by the Soviet government to help deal with the consequences of the nuclear disaster. Radiation has contaminated everything around the Pripyat area, including wildlife, and Gremov's squad is tasked with making sure nothing escapes the perimeter.

The average person can't grasp the scope of the consequences of a nuclear meltdown, so Chernobyl magnifies its lenses to something easier for us to grasp. Gremov's segment is one of those cases, but there are many others throughout the series. Coal miners from across the country (and the USSR was a huge country) are called to dig tunnels underneath the plant as part of the effort to avoid an even bigger disaster. More than three thousand liquidators, just like Gremov, were called to manually clear radioactive graphite debris, each doing so individually and with only 90 seconds to avoid radiation contamination.

These are insane efforts that are meant to deal with the consequences of a very preventable disaster. Not to mention the thousands of dead, these efforts disrupted the lives of thousands of people and wildlife because a few unconcerned individuals kept telling themselves nothing bad could happen without proper knowledge of what they were talking about. Chernobyl is set in the USSR during the Cold War, but it isn't about those two things; it's about the dangers of government secrecy and the consequences of neglecting technical and scientific expertise in crisis prevention. People have a way of banking on the risks of something going wrong just because they can't be bothered to do it right, and this happens in power spheres much more important than those of ordinary people.

Chernobyl first aired in May 2019, right after Game of Thrones ended its eight-season run. A year later, the COVID pandemic hit, and many of the same behaviors as the ones depicted in the series were seen in governments around the world — and many countries are still settling their debts with the truth, as Legasov put it. Now, in the face of a climate crisis that is intensifying by the year, authorities are still acting as if nothing bad will happen in the long run. Right now, with so many people denying climate change even in the face of constantly rising temperatures, it's impossible not to watch Chernobyl without thinking of our own world's debt.

Chernobyl is streaming on Max.

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