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I still have to finish the last episode, but it's all been great so far.. and kinda horrifying. I live like 10 miles from a reactor, they do warning tests once a month that sounds like an air raid siren.

Sucky part is the whole thing is there to give NYC power 100 miles away, and none for us

 Excommunicatus wrote:
Again, spend some time having fun with google autocomplete.

It isn't me who who is having a hard time telling the fact from the fiction, in a show that does not at all bill itself as fiction.

Nice try, though.

Maybe instead you need to raise your game and not blithely swallow outright lies?

Dramatization is not lies. It is FICTION . I don't know how else to tell you this. They did not make it a documentary, they provided outside material explaining what the differences between reality and the show are. They went out of their way to make sure people knew this.

People searching on google and finding information about this event is a win, as they are now interested in the real story.

Nice try, though.

A fitting end to a really brilliant series.
Loved the way they did the flashback to the build up of the explosion through the court trial.

Im going to miss it (even though it was damn grim at times!).

Maybe HBO should look to trying to make another miniseries in a similar vein...like Tiananmen?

Binged it over the weekend. Great show, the liberties they took and condensing it really helped it to be short and sweet so to speak. Great acting and visuals.

As for another series, maybe? I heard Tiananmen come by online a lot, but that seems far more complicated than Chernobyl. Based on the general knowledge people have of it alone and the amount of background dread its hard to get Tiananmen to capture lightning in a bottle again. Its going to be far more political and the big disaster being the crackdown it would not be as continuous as the radiation danger throughout 4 episodes.

I can see a lot of disaster/event style miniseries like Chernobyl, just have a hard time thinking of one that would have a similar feeling. In the same vein maybe the Titan missile explosion in its silo in the US? No radiation but similar levels of dread given its warhead etc.

I could see maybe the Cuban Missile Crisis as a mini-series. Focusing on the Russian submarine that had a single vote against starting a nuclear war as the main story-driver, with the bigger picture being told around them.

For followups, might I suggest something on Stanislav Petrov,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1958_Mars_Bluff_B-47_nuclear_weapon_loss_incident

Or
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1961_Goldsboro_B-52_crash?

The Us almost nuking itself- TWICE is as horrifying as it is fascinating. And Stanislav Petrov would flip the script and show an unabashed Russian hero, who was a hero because he covered up the right thing at the right time.

There are some ideas.
Maybe the BP oil Spill?
OR possibly something like, Bay of Pigs?
But nothing really captures the Dread of Chernobyl that we still have a very visible and long lasting reminder to look to, not to mention a disaster that was very much preventable, but wasnt because of the Govt at the time not wanting to risk looking weak

The Titan missile story is a good idea. It doesn't quite have the scale, but the claustrophobic horror is is cranked right up to 11 and some of the key figures in that story are fascinating characters in their own right. Plus you have the dilemma over whether to alert the town or not.

If you want a follow-on from 'Chernobyl', I'd recommend any of Surviving Disaster, the Horizon documentaries, A for Atom, Suicide Mission to Chernobyl or Nuclear Nightmares.

All made by Auntie Beeb, all manage to tell the story accurately and concisely, sometimes dramatically, without resorting to insulting your intelligence.

And again, it's all very well arguing your elitist "well 'we' understand', so it's all good". Perhaps you do. Most people do not. Most people are taking the words of the show as gospel.

Which is a shame, 'cause the amount of BS it contains detracts from the things it got right.

I mean its ironic that you say the others are elitist, while your stance basically reduces the film and tv industry to making documentaries. You could spend the rest of your life complaining about fictionalized or dramatized films and movies based on historical events.

Chernobyl doesn't bill itself as a documentary or even a historical docudrama, just a historical drama. Its good TV, which is exactly what people expected from it. If people want to learn they shouldn't be watching HBO dramas, why blame that on the show.

It absolutely does not. The reductio ad absurdum of my argument, that you're all using for convenience, states that but I've never said that.



What indeed.

 d-usa wrote:
I could see maybe the Cuban Missile Crisis as a mini-series. Focusing on the Russian submarine that had a single vote against starting a nuclear war as the main story-driver, with the bigger picture being told around them.

I like this one a lot, it has the world ending doom too. HBO must be pushing them for another one.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Excommunicatus wrote:
It absolutely does not. The reductio ad absurdum of my argument, that you're all using for convenience, states that but I've never said that.

What indeed.

So nowhere does it so documentary, its just a poster, meanwhile:
https://www.hbo.com/chernobyl

Starring Jared Harris, Stellan Skarsgård and Emily Watson, Chernobyl dramatizes the story of the 1986 nuclear accident — one of the worst man-made catastrophes in history — and the sacrifices made to save Europe from unimaginable disaster.

Again, nowhere do HBO or the writers say its totally true. As people have pointed out the man even has a podcast to explain what he changed and why.

Don't understand your beef with HBO on this honestly, should it continously flash disclaimers on the screen?

 Excommunicatus wrote:
If you want a follow-on from 'Chernobyl', I'd recommend any of Surviving Disaster, the Horizon documentaries, A for Atom, Suicide Mission to Chernobyl or Nuclear Nightmares.

All made by Auntie Beeb, all manage to tell the story accurately and concisely, sometimes dramatically, without resorting to insulting your intelligence.

I've seen more or less all of them and none successfully contextualise the disaster to the extent of this miniseries nor do they take the same care to outlay the many factors involved in the event itself. I found the one with Adrian Edmondson particularly soapy and simplistic in its depiction of Legasov, and most of the others concentrate blame on a particular failure like a smoking gun because it's the easiest way to tell this story in an hour or ninety minutes. By no standard would I consider them more "truthful" even by the standards you're claiming to be affronted here.

Sometimes things are popular because they're good and that's okay.

Just finished watching Chernobyl and it was one of the best dramas I've watched in a good while. The structure was excellent and I particularly liked the way we don't see the lead-up to the disaster until the final episode, which puts the initial focus on the immediate aftermath.

I think worrying about how much of it is "truth" is a bit silly. I didn't at any point think I was watching a documentary and the series actually intrigued me enough to go and read up about the disaster. Will everyone do that? Probably not, but I don't think anyone with any sort of intelligence will watch it and not realise things have been dramatized. The final episode even points out some of the changes they made for the purposes of drama, while the moments leading up to the disaster in the control room are always going to have to be dramatized because the only survivor from the senior staff who was actually there is the guy who was convicted, so we can never know for sure how much of his story was true. The same is true of many of the other scenes. We know three divers went under the reactor to open the sluice gate, for example. That was documented. We don't really know exactly what happened. Maybe they went straight for the gate controls, found them fine and opened the gate, all in 5 minutes or maybe they had to endure a terrifying journey through the bowels of the plant in near-total darkness. For the purposes of a dramatization the exact truth of that sequence isn't as important as the fact it happened and should be shown to have happened.

Casualty wrote:

Sometimes things are popular because they're good and that's okay.

I have never disagreed.

The 'Adrian Edmondson one' is Surviving Disaster. It's massively preferable to Chernobyl, even considering the fact they cast Eddie Hitler.

So
I watched it
Here is my opinion:

- Core scenario based on official version
- Good authentic decorations and clothing (except for small remarks, as nuclear power plant interior and city were new and not old/shabby).
- There are many mistakes and looks like they were made for purpose
- Everyone is stupid (escpecially people who responsible for anything) and eerything is chaotic
- It's expensive good quality movie but it's falling into trash level, because of Cold War era cliches like Pinochet helicopter hint, driving miners to die from radiation with AKs, drawing of "this is how atomic plant works" on the paper like in typical western SciFi horrors and other such things.
- Old woman refusing to leave, speaks about polish and jew cleansing by soviets and then soviet soldier kills a cow and it looks like he trying to kill her... Pure propaganda under "tuth unleashed" slogan? Is that really necessary to put it there? Answer: yes.
- I liked "biorobots on the roof" scene. It's one of few scenes that looks realistic.
- Blaming only Dyatlov while there are bad reactor design and bad instructions?

Some examples of the mistakes I found:
- Legasov wasn't "some old poor man", he lived in elite house and KGB didn't hunt for his audio tapes (at least no such information known)
- It was time of perestroyka but too much "commie" things shown. They call each other "tovarish" and at begginning ol man speaks about "Lenin would be proud, no one will leave city!" - instead of applauding people around would boo him and call insane (Yes it is, I know how was that time). Did the scenario writers know this time poorly or they added commie things for purpose?
- Who the hell is Khomyuk? (As I explained, dozens of specialists have been combined into one person for simplification, so that's ok.)
- "Bridge of death" is a legend. At that time, it was impossible to observe burning plant because of high trees. Legend was told by stalkers to attract tourists.
- Vodka. It was used during earlier Mayak accident. By the Chernobyl it was prooven that vodka is not effective against radiation and it has not been used anymore. Also, a prohibition act was in effect at that time and soldiers could only get wine.. but then be punished for it. From alcohol, they could only drink a low-alcohol milk drink, but they refused it.
- Shyadon shown as a fancy "white collar" guy, in reality he was miner himself. And if someone would show disrespect for him, he would be instantly punished by other miners.
- Digging mission was shown as a crusial. But at that time, most considered it optional “just in case"
- Some (few) people refused to leave rural area and no facts of domestical animal killing while owners was there known
- Radiation burns wasn't instant. It takes hours to burns appeared.
- The actions of personnel before the accident are shown as incompetent. But they did everything according to the instructions and until the last moment were sure that the experiment was a success.
- No one tried to detain people in the city of Pripyat to "let them expose to radiation, Lenin will be proud". On the contrary, they were forcibly evacuated (When the radiation threat was confirmed and the buses were ready).