The Human Cost

While I generally am not one for watching dramas, I do have a soft spot in my heart for period pieces. Usually that means watching kings and queens vie for power in, like, the 1200s or during the Victorian era, but from time to time that does extend out to other sections of history. Give me some people in historically accurate costumes, clearly British people playing characters of other nationalities, and some kind of high-stakes matter that the main characters have to deal with (for which we now, in the present, know what happened) and I’m absolutely on board.

Still, even by those rules I will say that diving into Chernobyl was a bit of a stretch for me. It certainly hit all the criteria I just listed above, but it was a little too current, a touch too modern to hit that weird urge that I normally feel. It’s the same reason why I stopped watching The Crown at a certain point because by then it was feeling more modern than I really cared about, and when I watch a historical drama I want to feel like I’m getting transported to a different time and place. If it’s set in, say, the 1980s then it’s from a period where I was actually alive and I don’t feel transported enough.

When it came out, though, everyone raved on and on about how good, although also harrowing, HBO’s Chernobyl mini-series was. Co-produced between HBO and Sky UK, the show was a critical darling, and was the stuff of watercooler conversations for a few weeks back in 2019. At the time it came out I didn’t have access to HBO, though, and while I’ve picked up DVD sets here or there of various shows I wanted to see, I didn’t ever spy a copy of Chernobyl floating around. Plus, to be honest, a five hour drama about people dying from a nuclear accident didn’t exactly sound like something I wanted to own… and maybe not something I even wanted to watch.

With access to the MaxThe oldest and longer-running cable subscription service, HBO provides entertainment in the force of licensed movies along with a huge slate of original programming, giving it the luster of the premiere cable service. Now known primarily for its streaming service, Max. app, though, and with the app recommending the show to me, it seemed like the right time to finally get in and see what I was missing. And, yes, it is just as good as everyone said. It’s five harrowing episodes, no doubt, and it doesn’t skimp on just how awful things were during and after the explosion at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine in 1986. It’s the kind of show you watch because you can’t stop, even though what you’re seeing is breathtakingly awful on so many levels. You don’t want to see how it all ends, but you can’t help yourself either.

The series starts right after the explosion at the power plant with deputy chief engineer Anatoly Dyatlov (Paul Ritter) ordering his workers around to try and figure out why the power plant is offline and how to get it back up. Most of the men try to tell him that the number four reactor had to have exploded (there was even a great rumbling from the plant before it happened), but Dyatlov refuses to believe it because, quite simply, “this kind of reactor can’t explode.” The building might be on fire, he concedes, but the reactor can’t have exploded because, well, that just can’t happen. It can’t.

But it did. Firemen are sent to take care of the flames, and they quickly begin to fall ill. Neighbors watch the planet from a bridge in the distance, thinking it quite pretty (and not an absolutely unsafe blast of gamma rays streaming out from the hole in the planet), and then eventually they all die. Even then men that come along after, deputy director of the Kurchatov Institute Valery Legasov (Jared Harris) and Council of Ministers' deputy chairman Boris Shcherbina (Stellan Skarsgård), there to aid in the cleanup efforts, will eventually fall ill. And all because the people in charge of the plant simply didn’t understand the flaws of the building, and through their own incompetence they caused one of the worst nuclear disasters ever.

Suffice it to say that Chernobyl is not a happy kind of story. It’s stated early on, by Harris’s Legasov, that everyone on site will eventually die. Just being there, for any length of time, in Chernobyl, is taking years off their lives, leading to their eventual deaths from cancer. And they’re the lucky ones. The first responders, who got the worst of the radiation right at the start, had only days before their body effectively liquified and obliterated itself as the radiation shredded them from the inside out. No one walked away from this safe and sound.

But as the mini-series shows us, the reason all this happened was incompetence. The power plant was built quickly, and brought online as fast as possible, so that the men in charge – deputy chief engineer Anatoly Dyatlov along with Chernobyl manager Viktor Bryukhanov (Con O'Neill) and Chernobyl chief engineer Nikolai Fomin (Adrian Rawlins) – were all bucking for adoration from the Soviet government, as well as upward mobility for their own lives, and if they rushed the process to get the plant online, they’d get everything they ever wanted. But the rush job was flawed, and some tests that needed to be passed weren’t, even after the plant came online. And their incompetence led to the eventual explosion, at their own hands no less.

But even then, the Soviet government itself didn’t come away smelling of roses (irradiated or otherwise). Up and down the ranks were men who were worried only about how things looked for the Soviet state, not what was best for the country or the world. They couldn’t tell other countries what happened because then they’d lose face. They couldn’t look weak to others within their own government because then they might lose power. It was all a bit of gamesmanship, before, during, and after the disaster, and the Soviet government simply didn’t know how to function otherwise.

Honestly, the drama of the series is great. It’s like watching the Titanic, mid glacial hit, and then seeing the aftermath play out slowly for days, weeks, and months as characters try to rebuild and figure out what’s next. Why did this happen? What do we do to fix it? Can it even be fixed? These are questions the show raises, and the answers aren’t always happy. But the characters at the core, Legasov and Shcherbina along with Minsk nuclear physicist Ulana Khomyuk (Emily Watson), really do care about helping as many as they could in the wake of the disaster, and it makes for compelling television.

The actors on the show are great, from the three leads on down. If there was any complaint I had, though, it’s that none of them even attempt to put on a Soviet accent of any kind. Harris is great in his role, but he’s playing a very Jared Harris character, British accent included. The same can be said for Skarsgård, who has his lightly inflected Swedish accent coming through, but not sounding at all Russian (or even regionally appropriate). Up and down the cast this is the case, and while I understand that this was co-produced by Sky UK, you’d think they would have at least tried to do the accents to make the series sound authentic. It looks the part, through and through, but absolutely doesn’t sound it.

But that is one flaw in an otherwise brilliantly made mini-series. Chernobyl is depressing to watch, and I don’t know that I’d ever want to watch it again, for any reason, but I’m glad I sat through it one time. It’s so good, so well made, that I do think everyone should watch it once. Just once, so you know (more or less) what happened back in 1986 in Ukraine. But… maybe not ever again.