Radioactive Material TRUTH AND LIES IN CHERNOBYL
Not long after its fifth and final episode aired, HBO and Sky’s miniseries Chernobyl became the highest-rated television series on the Internet Movie Database.1 It would be easy to assume that this popularity is at least partially due to the tragic nature of the event it depicts: that being the 1986 meltdown of the No. 4 reactor of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the then-Soviet-ruled Ukraine. After all, significant disasters are endlessly mined for the screen; whether they be terrorist attacks (United 93, Paul Greengrass, 2006; World Trade Center, Oliver Stone, 2006; Patriots Day, Peter Berg, 2016), natural events (The Impossible, JA Bayona, 2012) or catastrophic engineering failures (Deepwater Horizon, Berg, 2016; Titanic, James Cameron, 1997), real-world tragedies are a source of boundless fascination for audiences.
So where does Chernobyl sit among this litany of on-screen disaster narratives? Thankfully, the miniseries is nuanced, believable and balanced, with part of its appeal coming from its ability to drag certain facts and minutiae of the Chernobyl explosion into the light – details that only those versed in the tragedy would be aware of. That these specifics would have been new to many viewers might be partly due to the USSR’s cover-up attempts, but perhaps it has more to do with the way many of us consume news media (not to mention the fact that the event occurred before many viewers were born). In fact, the show’s creator, Craig Mazin, has spoken of how, at the time of the disaster, he knew nothing beyond the superficial facts: ‘Chernobyl was a nuclear power plant, and it blew up. That’s it.’2
To illuminate these little-known details, the series presents a range of firsthand experiences of the meltdown itself, as well as those of people who were privy to the subsequent cover-up and clean-up. It casts an unflinching gaze overalso shows how further tragedies were only prevented due to the will and sacrifice of ordinary citizens.
