Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Chernobyl’ On HBO, A Scripted Account Of The Nuclear Accident And Its Aftermath

The explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in 1986 was one of the worst man-made disasters of the 20th century; not only did it kill 28 people directly and more years later because of radiation exposure, it caused the entire town of Pripyat in the Ukraine to be abandoned due to deadly radiation levels that will likely keep the area a ghost town for centuries to come. The new HBO/Sky miniseries Chernobyl examines the disaster and its aftermath. Read on for more…

CHERNOBYL: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A man sits in his kitchen in a shabby apartment, listening back to a recording he made on his observations of the Chernobyl disaster investigation. “As for what Dyatlov did, the man doesn’t deserve prison; he deserves death.”

The Gist: The man listening to the recording is Valery Legasov (Jared Harris), an academic whose expertise on the type of reactor Chernobyl used led him to being put on the investigative task force by the Soviet government. A graphic says “Moscow, April 26, 1988.” He records his final observations, which he said he’d deny. Then he wraps the tapes in newspaper, goes out to his garbage cans and hides the stash in a vent, goes back inside his apartment to feed his cat, then hangs himself.

We go back to “Two years and one minute ago”, April 26 1986, at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant near Pripyat, Ukraine. A fire is seen in the distance of the apartment of fire fighter Vasily Ignatenko (Adam Nagaitis) and his wife Lyudmilla (Jesse Buckley); then an explosion happens, and the shockwave is so strong it almost knocks Lyudmilla over. The fire and explosion are coming from the power plant.

In the plant’s control room, where the crew had been performing a test that entailed shutting down warning systems, deputy chief engineer Anatoly Dyatlov (Paul Ritter) orders water be pumped into the core in reactor #4, where the explosion happened. When an engineer comes back to say that the core is “gone,” Dyatlov dismisses the report, saying that it’s impossible for the core to be “gone.” If anything, the core may have started to melt down, but the crew’s mediocre Geiger counters are pinned at a number that is bad, but not deadly (of course, since the meters only go up to that number, things could be worse, but Dyatlov refuses to think about that). He keeps sending engineers to investigate; if they come back, they’re covered in radiation burns and start vomiting.

Vasily gets called to the scene to fight what’s supposed to be a fire on the roof, but he sees his colleagues picking up large chunks of graphite, which he knows isn’t normal. Later he sees those colleagues being treated for burns to their hands and/or radiation sickness. Back in town, Lyudmilla joins the rest of the town in watching the fire burn from afar, not knowing that they’re being zapped by massive amounts of radiation; when fallout flutters down, the kids play in it like it’s snow.

Dyatlov meets with plant directors Viktor Bryukhanov (Con O’Neill) and Nikolai Fomin (Adrian Rawlings), and they call in the Pripyat council. The council decides to cut the town off from all means of communication. At the end of that meeting, as Dyatlov collapses from radiation sickness, one of his engineers comes in to say that, after getting the more robust meters, the radiation numbers are pinned at the meter’s maximum reading — which is almost 70 times what the other meters were reading. Meanwhile, the local hospital is getting inundated with victims.

Our Take: Something about Chernobyl, at least the first episode, feels off. The show’s topic, the Chernobyl explosion and its aftermath, is pretty grim, and at times it’s treated with the proper seriousness. But in other respects, the disaster is treated as an inconvenience to the officials who have to deal with its aftermath. Not that the gross negligence and dismissive attitudes of people like Dyaltov and his bosses wasn’t true to life, especially in light of how bureaucratic Soviet Russia was in its last years. But the whole episode has a weird tonality that makes it seem more like an extremely dark comedy than a dead-serious exploration of one of the 20th century’s worst man-made disasters.

Part of it could be the mostly-British cast. Yes, we understand that casting Brits in Russian roles, where they all speak in English with their native accents, was a stylistic choice by EPs Craig Mazin (who wrote the series) and Johan Renck (who directed it). But in an era where shows like The Americans cast Russians in Russian roles and had no problem having them speak Russian to each other, the whole Brits-playing-Russians thing feels like a throwback to an earlier era of television where producers didn’t have faith in their audiences to stay with a show where people spoke in languages other than English and/or had accents that weren’t straight out of Buckingham Palace.

It could also be that Mazin is known more for writing comedies like The Hangover II and Identity Thief than dramas like Chernobyl, but the wryness in the first episode just feels misplaced. At the same time, the episode moves at a plodding pace. But the performances of Ritter as the inept Dyatlov and Harris as Legasov will likely keep us watching, as will the appearances of Emily Watson and Stellan Skarsgård in subsequent episodes.

Sex and Skin: Not here.

Parting Shot: As children in Pripyat go to school the next morning, a bird falls out of the sky and dies. Some bad days are ahead for the people of Pripyat.

Sleeper Star: Jesse Buckley’s character Lyudmilla looks like she’ll be a voice of reason in this story, so we’re looking forward to seeing more of her as things in Pripyat get worse.

Most Pilot-y Line: “I don’t know if I can make things better for you, but I can certainly make them worse,” Dyatlov says to the one renaming engineer he hasn’t sent to find out what’s going on. Those are the typical words of a shitty boss; we’re surprised that wasn’t lifted from a Dilbert strip from 1995.

Our Call: STREAM IT for the performances, but be ready to arch your eyebrows at how much weirder Chernobyl is than you’d ever expect it to be.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.

Stream Chernobyl on HBO