HBO Mini series - Chernobyl

[Robbie Barrett]

So now this is rated the best TV show of all time? It's good but not that good.

[El Gitano]

Russia to make its own show about Chernobyl that implicates the US

Russian state TV is working on its own version of Chernobyl, a series based on the worst nuclear accident in history.

The NTV drama will deviate from the acclaimed HBO series - and from historical reality - by claiming that the CIA was involved in the disaster.

Director Aleksey Muradov claims it will show "what really happened back then".

HBO's miniseries, which concluded on Monday, received the highest ever score for a TV show on IMdB, as well as a 9.1 rating on Russian equivalent Kinopoisk

But in an interview with Komsomolskaya Pravda, Russia's most widely-read tabloid, Mr Muradov said his version of the show "proposes an alternative view on the tragedy in Pripyat".

"There is a theory that Americans infiltrated the Chernobyl nuclear power plant," he told the paper. "Many historians do not rule out the possibility that on the day of the explosion, an agent of the enemy's intelligence services was working at the station."

Chernobyl disaster: 'I didn't know the truth'
Will Gompertz reviews Chernobyl
The Hollywood Reporter reports that the Russian culture ministry has contributed 30 million rubles ($463,000; £363,000) to the show.

The No. 4 reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear plant exploded on 26 April 1986 in the Ukrainian city of Pripyat.

At least 31 people were killed in the immediate aftermath, and the effects continue to be felt to this day.

There has been plenty of praise in Russia for the authenticity of Chernobyl.

Izvestia newspaper declared it a more 'realistic' portrayal of the era than most Russian films manage. There's also admiration of how the series conveys the heroism of ordinary people.

But there's been a crescendo of criticism, too. One columnist declared the show a plot to undermine Russia's current atomic agency. Others called it American 'propaganda', blackening the image of the USSR and exaggerating the callousness of the Soviet response.

No-one disputes that it's got people talking. They're been busy sharing their own Chernobyl stories on social media, with younger Russians often hearing them for the first time. So one Twitter user thanked the series for 'giving us back our history.'
In the end, as one commentator concludes, the main reason for the backlash is likely a feeling of shame that it was the US that told the tale of Chernobyl, not Russia itself.

The show has been particularly unpopular with Russian state TV and the country's tabloid newspapers.

Speaking to TV website Teleprogramma, columnist Anatoly Wasserman said: "If Anglo-Saxons film something about Russians, it definitely will not correspond to the truth."

Chernobyl: The end of a three-decade experiment
The people who moved to the Chernobyl exclusion zone
This, he continued, was because "they don't like us" and "they cannot understand us".

Komsomolskaya Pravda published several negative articles about the show - including one floating a conspiracy theory that it was produced by competitors of Rosatom, Russia's state nuclear company, to ruin the country's reputation as a nuclear power.

But reviewers in independent media outlets praised its writer Craig Mazin for his minute attention to detail.

Slava Malamud, a US-based journalist who grew up during the Soviet era in what is now Moldova, wrote on the independent Russian news site Meduza that "the respect and meticulousness the show's creators brought to their work is breathtaking".

"Like I see the license plate for a car in one scene has the real numbers for the [Kiev] region," he said. "Who's going to notice that in America or England?"

For the Kremlin, the topic of history is a highly sensitive one - especially about the Soviet Union.

Official media now tend to paint a sanitised, idealised vision of the USSR, and portray Putin's Russia as its spiritual heir.

This makes it easy to see any critical view of the Soviet past as an attack on the Kremlin's ideological power base.

It's a narrative it seeks to completely control and guard from outside influences - particularly from a West it sees as hostile.

Some Russians feel the version of reality offered by Kremlin-controlled media is not entirely unlike the lies told by the Soviet state.

As a result, perhaps the most dangerous idea was the key question running though Chernobyl - what is the cost of lies?

[Don Pichardo]

I was just reading that plants and nature, adapted themselves over time to the radiation 'Creating various proteins and enzymes to deal with the situation' power of nature.

greent thanks for posting

[BrometheusBob.]

It's impossible to watch HBO's CHERNOBYL without thinking of Donald Trump; like those in charge of the doomed Russian reactor, he's a man of mediocre intelligence in charge of great power--economic, global--that he does not understand.

— Stephen King (@StephenKing) May 30, 2019

How tf did he make this about Trump

[JimRaynor]

This was one of the best miniseries I have ever seen. I tip my hat to the Brits for producing something like this.

[LaidOut]

This was one of the best miniseries I have ever seen. I tip my hat to the Brits for producing something like this.

I'm with you. This was Must-Watch TV. There were some heroic mo-fo's that did things most people wouldn't do today.

[denium]

So now this is rated the best TV show of all time? It's good but not that good.

You can't really compare a mini series to an 8 season epic like GOT.

A more appropriate comparison would be something like Band of Brothers.

[Beercules]

I finished the last episode a couple nights ago.



So ****ed up great series

[GrandmasterWang]

Amazing series.

Good on that woman who held her husband's hand. I'm glad she survived.

[johnbook]

I saw it all.

While it was good drama, it was quite bogus on many levels.

In general, it's TV, the antithesis of truth.

Specifically it depicted physically impossible things or scenarios. E.g., the scientist says it will soon blow up with megaton force. A nuclear reactor cannot possibly blow up as a nuclear bomb. Steam explosion etc is a conventional explosion which then has enriched uranium or other radionuclides released.

We've also seen in the last 20 years--such as bombings on 7/7 in London, then when they are doing a "disaster test" they are actually perpetrating a disaster--naturally to be blamed on foreign terrorists. At Chernobyl, that's precisely what they were doing--disaster testing--when it allegedly "got out of hand."

Indeed the Russian TV series to come is said to show a CIA agent was there in the control room and deliberately did it.
More likely it was an MI6 agent.

So it was good drama, but no genuine person should consider for a moment that that's what actually happened, at least as far as the most crucial aspect--what and who caused it.