Haunting questions of truth rise in ‘Chernobyl’
Haunting questions of truth rise in ‘Chernobyl’
The 2019 HBO miniseries slipped by me when it was first released, but its lessons are just as important today as they were when the series came out.
One of the reasons it’s so hard to leave my HBO Max subscription behind, despite long periods in which I don’t watch anything on the streamer, is that I know it holds a large selection of TV shows that will bowl me over once I actually give them a chance. HBO has had plenty of prestige TV misses over the years, but its hits are ample proof that it still deserves a premium reputation.
One of those hits that I hadn’t given a try until now is “Chernobyl,” the 2019 HBO miniseries which tells the true story of the worst nuclear disaster in human history. The show not only documents the disaster itself, but also the immediate aftermath and investigation into a devastating accident that should never have happened.
The series is HBO at its best, with an ensemble cast of unfailingly powerhouse performances, spectacular dialogue, and production values that make the viewer feel as if they have been transported into a 1986 nuclear power plant in Soviet Ukraine, or to the starkly constructed, utilitarian city of Pripyat.
Any time a show plans an image into my head that I’ll never forget is a noteworthy occurrence, and “Chernobyl” does it twice through the course of its five-episode run. The image of a burning nuclear reactor terrifies me in a way that no special-effects-generated monster ever could, and the unspeakable transformation of a human being into a radiation-poisoned creature in the show’s third episode is an image so graphic I’m not sure I can ever watch it again without looking away.
Fans of other HBO shows from the 2010s will see plenty of familiar faces in the cast; I seemed to count at least a half-dozen actors I recognized from “Game of Thrones” in the series. But as stated above, all of these performers carry their weight, and the show’s trio of stars — Jared Harris, Stellan Skarsgård, and Emily Watson — are stupendous in their respective roles as nuclear scientist Valery Legasov, Communist party official Boris Shcherbina, and scientist Ulana Khomyuk.
Each of these characters — with the exception of Khomyuk, who served as a composite of dozens of different scientists who contributed to the Chernobyl containment and cleanup — is based on a real-life figure who was central to the disaster. That’s the most haunting thing about “Chernobyl” — the real-life lessons about the truth that carry on into the 20th century.
The show advances that the Chernobyl disaster was not only caused by operator error on the fateful day of the accident, but by design flaws that were covered up by the Soviet government to avoid losing face on an international stage. Those decisions created an ecological cataclysm the world won’t recover fully from in our lifetimes, and the show’s writing doesn’t try to avoid the fact that the Soviet government and the Communist way of life contributed greatly to what happened at Chernobyl in 1986.
But those lessons aren’t only applicable to a single style of government or political philosophy. In a time where journalists are asked to sign a pledge not to obtain information specifically authorized by government agencies, the lessons of “Chernobyl” show themselves to be every bit as relevant now as they were in 1986, or in 2019 when the show was first released. Truth is present no matter what efforts are made to conceal it, and many times trying to hide the truth leads to deadly consequences.
I realize I’m a bit late to the boat on “Chernobyl,” but I’m also sure that other viewers saw the show’s difficult subject matter and decided to skip it when it was first released. If you haven’t watched it yet, I can’t recommend streaming it on HBO Max at the earliest opportunity highly enough.
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