Chernobyl, the five-part miniseries concluding tonight on HBO, is not just excellent television; it’s paradigm-shifting historical storytelling, the kind of tale that alters, ever-so-subtly, the texture of the real world. Two weeks after I finished the series, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. What stayed with me most were the bodies of the radiation-poisoned first responders, so ravaged by their exposure that they are putrefying slowly, horribly, while clinging to life.
I watched the screeners with my husband, and for days afterward we were googling the disaster, sending morbid facts to each other. I called my father, a history buff, and recommended the show; turns out he’s already watched the first four episodes, has set his DVR to record the fifth, and in the meantime has researched all the active nuclear power plants in the United States. Chernobyl gets under your skin.
We are not alone: The miniseries, as of this weekend, has topped iMDb’s 250 highest-rated shows list (unseating Planet Earth II); sparked resurgent debate about nuclear energy; and prompted conversation, if not outright argument, about the show’s depiction of Soviet Russia, socialism, and nuclear physics. The Moscow Times argues that Russia should have made Chernobyl, while RT proclaims the miniseries “fake.”
In the weeks since the series debuted, Google searches for not just “chernobyl,” but esoteric details like “rbmk reactor,” “valery legasov,” and “pripyat,” have spiked. The Nuclear Energy Institute — the policy arm of the nuclear technology industry — released a fact sheet about Chernobyl, asserting American reactors’ compliance and safety. Apparently, the NEI is even running ads on Google searches. Nuclear disaster is less of a boogeyman now than it was during the height of the Cold War, but it seems that Chernobyl has served as a reminder of past hauntings.
The series, from Craig Mazin, dramatizes the 1986 nuclear meltdown at the Chernobyl Power Plant—a Level 7 nuclear disaster that set loose seven tons of nuclear fuel into the atmosphere. (By comparison, Hiroshima and Nagasaki used about two pounds of nuclear material each.) Invisible radiation and Soviet propaganda are not inherently easy topics to dramatize, but Chernobyl uses the unknown to gripping effect, turning the dread of not-knowing—and widespread apparatchik denial—into slow-burning, autocratic horror.
Jared Harris stars as the scientist Valery Legasov, the expert on the commission formed to handle the disaster. The bulk of the series takes place as the Chernobyl incident unfolds, but its very first scene is set exactly two years afterward—when, attended by his cat, Legasov hangs himself. (Harris, it seems, has been typecast.)
With that ominous opening, Chernobyl takes the audience back to the night of the disaster. In its fifth and final episode, as Legasov tries to recreate the events of the night in a Soviet courtroom, the show takes us even further—to the calm before the reactor core ripped open the power plant, sent a radioactive flume into the sky, and blanketed a 1,000 square mile radius with fallout.
The scale and magnitude of the disaster, coupled with the science-fictiony quality of radiation and the repression of the Soviet regime, make for potent drama. Like many other viewers, I have no memories of the the media coverage of Chernobyl disaster, or even of the Soviet Union. The state exists, for me, as the background ghoul of James Bond movies—and more recently, as the shadowy bureaucracy controlling Philip and Elizabeth in The Americans. Mazin’s subject is as much the repression and misinformation rife in the U.S.S.R. as it is the nuts and bolts of nuclear disaster. To be sure, the series takes Hollywood’s typical liberties with historical record—though New York Times science writer Henry Fountain suggests that doesn’t really matter.
“The mini-series gets a basic truth right — that the Chernobyl disaster was more about lies, deceit and a rotting political system than it was about bad engineering,” Fountain adds. “How the show gets to its truth. . . is less important than that it gets there.”
Details may be changed—Emily Watson’s character, the show acknowledges in the finale, is an amalgamation of dozens of scientists—but the mood is transporting and evocative, bringing to life the dozens of characters who live in the hope of some promise of communism, some proof of their superiority to the Americans, and above all, the very human need not to be responsible for the biggest nuclear incident in the world. The debilitating, self-immolating weaknesses of the Soviet Union are in full display—as is the shocking self-sacrifice of the “liquidators,” the conscripted clean-up crew, who worked in grave conditions, with certain poisoning, for the glory of their nation. When radiation scrambled electrical circuits, rendering robots useless, the regime turned to capable and disposable “bio-robots"—that is, human beings.
On the blown-apart roof of Reactor 4—and this is factual—the liquidators were sent, in 90-second bursts, to shovel whatever graphite they could find over the edge. The workers were limited to seconds because of how powerfully radioactive these shards of graphite were; in the series, their supervisor explains that this is the most important 90 seconds of their lives. When they emerge, in their gear, it is as if they have stepped onto the moon. 90 seconds is not very long to mitigate the effects of the biggest nuclear disaster in history. So four more men are sent up, and then four more.
Other shows currently airing tweak some of the same themes captured so ably in Chernobyl. The Hulu miniseries, Catch-22, adapted from Joseph Heller’s book, stars Christopher Abbott as “Yoyo,” a.k.a. John Yossarian—a bombardier in the Army Air Force, desperately trying to escape the closed fist of active duty, but consistently unable to outrun the imprisoning regulations and marching orders that confine him to a life of dropping bombs. He may not have known the term “bio-robot,” but he would have recognized the sentiment
Death stalks Yossarian, and an irrational order confines him—but unlike Chernobyl, Catch-22 doesn’t quite turn its hellish events into something that feels like hell. That’s partly because the miniseries attempts to emulate the signature sardonic tone of its source material—which serves to undermine the horrors of war, instead of reinforcing them. It’s also because the show is so beautiful. Golden Italian light bathes the bodies of the soldiers in radiant glory, as if to shine brilliance on the innocence and beauty they are rapidly losing; midair, flaming debris floats gracefully around the bombers, turning their bloody rampages into landscapes as pretty as a screensaver.
But mostly, it’s because while Abbott is talented, Yossarian’s character is lost in translation. As the show unfolds, he seems less scared than bored. And it’s never clear why he has such sharp edges while the rest of his squadron does not.
Good Omens, another new novel adaptation, addresses the fear of annihilation head on: its subject is the end of days, and its heroes are an angel and a demon (Michael Sheen and David Tennant, having the time of their lives) who have joined unlikely forces to stave off the final battle. Show-runner Neil Gaiman also co-wrote the book on which the show is based, and as a result, the series is entirely too faithful—fantastic casting aside. (If Frances McDormand is here only to describe the events of the series to me, I’d rather just read the book.)
But the main problem, again, is the series’s light touch. Toward the end of its six-episode run, the four horsemen of the Apocalypse — they ride motorcycles now — commandeer the world’s nuclear missiles, readying us all for a hundred thousand Chernobyls. At the last possible moment, the entire thing gets called off, sort of on a technicality. It’s anticlimactic, and a bit frustrating. Surely the idea of annihilation weighs too much to be so carelessly tossed aside.
Despite the NEI’s concerns, I’m not so sure that the resurgence of interest in Chernobyl corresponds to our increased skepticism of nuclear energy (my dad notwithstanding). It’s a curious misread of the series itself, which squarely lays the blame for Chernobyl at the feet of the Soviet Union itself—painstakingly pointing out every safety issue ignored, every risky cost-saving mechanism, every selfish bureaucrat looking only to his or her own advancement. The characters speak in British English, which is a jarring note in the midst of so much verisimilitude. But this choice also has an upside: with this approach, differences in class are much more obvious to English-speaking audiences than they would be in subtitled Russian.
Really, Chernobyl toys with the terror of having no control—of being at the mercy of vast bureaucracies and atom-splitting technologies, of trying to live a small life in the midst of grand uncertainty. In 1986, the average age of Pripyat—the city, now abandoned, just over a mile away from the plant—was just 26. Young people were trying to start families in this place, not knowing they were on the cusp of disaster. Catch-22 focuses on soldiers, and Good Omens is too merry to slow down. Chernobyl is about civilians in an ordinary town. Again, it’s horror—and a very plausible kind of horror, too. One day, the sky might fall.
A controversial detail from Chernobyl involves a helicopter crash that occurred in the early days of containment, when a helicopter flies into the plume of the explosion and falls, as one critic put it, “like a wasp zapped with Raid.” It would appear this story was invented for the screen—a helicopter did crash during the liquidation of Chernobyl, but not because of the plume of smoke, and not so soon after the incident.
Then again, helicopters fly overhead all the time; in New York, they are seemingly lower and more frequently than ever. Fictionalized as it may be, it’s difficult for me to forget this image: not simply the idea that the world we know might fall apart at the seams, but also the awful understanding, the knowledge, that the seams are there in the first place, waiting to be torn apart.
