We all have our bad days at work. Sometimes you have to deal with an abrasive, domineering boss. Sometimes you’re tasked with meeting impossibly high quotas, despite unclear instructions and faulty equipment. And sometimes, all those things are going on at once, and you happen to be working in the control room of Chernobyl Reactor No. 4, early on April 26, 1986…
That’s when you know you’re in for a really bad day.
HBO’s Chernobyl aired as a five-part miniseries back in 2019. Somehow it took me until 2022 to actually get around to watching it—despite my proven affinity for all things Soviet, and all things nuclear, I missed a show that hits my tastes as precisely as a laser-guided smart bomb. When I did watch Chernobyl, I was of course quite pleased. I recall needing an emergency coffee at work because I’d wanted to squeeze in “one more” episode the night before. I’ve revisited it some three or four times in the years since, and now I’m going to rave about it on my blog, too.
Chernobyl was written and directed by Craig Mazin, and while it has an expansive cast, it centers on a core trio played by Jared Harris (also in the Foundation TV show), Stellan Skarsgård (who played a great side character in The Hunt for Red October1), and Emily Watson (whom I recognized from Equilibrium). Mazin delivers the story in non-linear fashion; the opening scene takes place in 1988, and then we jump back to the moment of the disaster, when Reactor No. 4 blows its lid off during what was supposed to be a routine test. The following episodes continue through 1986 as the Soviet government tries (and for the most part, fails) to control the situation. Only in the fifth and final episode do we see the lead-up to the accident.
This is a show that will teach you all about nuclear physics, in more detail than you probably ever thought possible. While the material seems arcane—U-235, dosimeters, iodine, roentgens—it is delivered with such straightforwardness, and woven so naturally into a riveting story, that the technical elements should be accessible to just about anyone. There’s a narrative trick to this. Jared Harris and Emily Watson play two scientists, Valery Legasov and Ulana Khomyuk2, who are already specialists in the field, but they often have to explain things to Skarsgård’s Party bureaucrat, Boris Shcherbina, and to Mikhail Gorbachev, leader of the whole Soviet Union. By extension, they educate the viewer, too.
Chernobyl depicts the nuclear catastrophe on a visceral level, not just an intellectual one. Parts of it play more like a horror film than a historical drama. If you’ve ever wanted to see someone literally fall apart from the inside out, this is your chance! Radiation poisoning isn’t pretty, especially at the levels many Chernobyl plant workers and firefighters were subjected to. This series does not flinch in showing what it does to people. And even the reactor itself becomes an object of horror; after the explosion, we’re treated to many shots of the exposed core, dark and monstrous, ruined control rods twisted like tentacles, pulsing deadly smoke into a grey sky.
There’s no shortage of other things I could praise about this series. The writing is some of the best I have ever seen on television, offering a buffet of endlessly quotable lines. All the actors do an amazing job. Visually, it looks spectacular, even if it has a strong tendency towards greys and blues. The look and feel of the show are immersive. If you ever wanted to live in the mid-1980s Soviet Union—which you probably didn’t—Chernobyl ought to scratch that itch. We’ve got all the attractions here: cool uniforms, statues of Lenin, badass propaganda murals, dodgy cars, crappy apartments. Also, incompetent Party bureaucrats. Lots of incompetent Party bureaucrats.
One thing Chernobyl portrays quite well is the utter fecklessness of the Soviet system. While Gorbachev was in power by 1986, the political and social environment had been shaped by his predecessor, Leonid Brezhnev, who presided over nearly two decades of stagnation. Most of the Party elite were survivors of World War II and the reign of Joseph Stalin. To ensure their own success in a cutthroat system, they had learned a particular game with particular rules: flatter your superiors, cover up inconvenient facts, and above all, pin the blame on the other guy.
That’s not a recipe for success when a nuclear reactor has just exploded. In fact, several key players in the plant administration spend a long time denying that there even was an explosion, to the point of doing acrobatics around objective reality. We’re treated to the following exchange in the Reactor No. 4 control room:
Dyatlov (the guy in charge): “What does the dosimeter say?”
Akimov (a technician): “3.6 roentgen. But that’s as high as the meter—“
Dyatlov: “3.6. Not great, not terrible.”
And so, the number that passes up the chain of command is 3.6 roentgen, even when the radiation meter has plainly maxed out its reading. But what’s more important than facts? Short-term political advantage, of course. For that very same reason, the design for the reactor at Chernobyl, the RBMK, was pressed into service all across the Soviet Union, despite a known and potentially catastrophic design flaw…
You’ll learn a lot about the Chernobyl disaster, watching this series, but you shouldn’t take everything at face value. This gets into what is really my only gripe: the way it plays fast and loose with the facts. Only after I’d read the superb Midnight in Chernobyl, by Adam Higginbotham, did I realize how much artistic license is on display here. Sure, it’s a dramatization, and the director was quite open about the things he changed, but Chernobyl makes for much better television than it does a depiction of real events. Just a few of the departures from reality:
- The show depicts the notorious “Bridge of Death,” where nearby citizens gathered to watch the burning reactor, only for them all to die soon afterwards from radioactive fallout. This is believed to be a myth. Shots of children playing amid ash from the reactor, like some demonic snowfall, are also extremely exaggerated.
- A firefighter is depicted with gruesome burns on his hand, mere minutes after he picked up a chunk of highly radioactive graphite. This is a shocking scene, but it didn’t happen—in reality, that firefighter complained about his hand feeling numb and swollen, and that was on the following day.
- Anatoly Dyatlov is depicted as an utter asshole, through and through. He does literally nothing sympathetic over the course of the show. In reality, while he was known as a difficult and abrasive boss, he adamantly maintained that none of his subordinates (then at risk of prison) were at fault in the disaster, blaming it instead on the reactor’s fundamental design flaws. After Toptunov died, Dyatlov wrote a letter to his family praising him as a great employee.
One more inaccuracy I’d like to discuss: the portrayal of the Soviet state. The sense of bureaucratic complacency is spot-on, but it’s much harder to buy the show’s depiction of the Soviet Union as an all-powerful totalitarian behemoth, when in reality it would collapse less than five years later. Even in 1986, Gorbachev had already begun to defang it. While variations of “do this or you’ll be shot” appear on many, many occasions, the late Soviet system didn’t work that way. The Stalin days, with their gulags and mass extrajudicial killings, were by that point long gone. The KGB relied on other, more subtle ways to suppress people.
The creators of this show clearly did their research—they just overrode it in the name of crafting a great story. I can’t fault them too much for that. I just recommend that anyone watching Chernobyl pair it with one of the terrific nonfiction accounts out there, so that they don’t walk away with some fundamentally incorrect ideas about things.
I suppose this makes two weeks in a row of me geeking out about Soviet history. Hopefully you’ve learned something, though—or even better, been inspired to watch a truly splendid piece of television. Chernobyl is a terrific experience, whatever my historical gripes might be. I don’t watch much TV, but I made time for this one, and in fact lost sleep to it. Strongly recommended!
Rating: 10/10.
As always, thanks for reading. If you stumbled here off the internet, be sure to plug in your email, below, so that you don’t miss any future reviews I publish.
Some housekeeping: I’m coming up on the finish line for my book, which I hope to finish by the new year. This unfortunately means that I don’t have the mental bandwidth for a post next weekend. I will return on December 29, after Christmas. In the meantime, I hope you all have a wonderful holiday season—stay warm out there!
- Amusingly, his character in that film takes a cavalier approach to nuclear safety. ↩︎
- Not a historical character, but a composite representing the many, many scientists who participated in the Chernobyl cleanup and investigation. ↩︎
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