'Chernobyl' Avoids A Genre Meltdown & Is One Of The Year's Best Series [Review]

Deliberate in its approach, precise in its execution, and devastating long after its departure, “Chernobyl” encapsulates the purest essence of good television despite a rejection of that genre’s most notable tropes. There are no action set-pieces, lessons don’t come easy, and the characters never crackle with an engaging familiarity that invites sympathy. What remains, then, is a treacherously difficult exploration of humanity’s most reprehensible instincts, along with some of the best, with both ends of this dichotomy bleeding into a middle ground where they mingle like so much boron, sand, and radioactive material.

In the first episode of HBO’s five-part mini-series, the viewer is given little time to acclimate to the time (April 1986) and place (Pripyat, Ukraine) of events. There’s been an explosion at the U.S.S.R.’s Chernobyl Nuclear Facility, and the staff there are scrambling to assess the situation. The primary concern for those in charge is less about dealing with the consequences of the emergency than assigning blame to someone else, with fingers pointing every direction except inward.

This circular bureaucracy kills a number of people, badly, and sets the tone for a story that is an indictment of protecting the lies of the state rather than the lives of the citizenry. It’s the struggle the series’ lead grapples with throughout the ordeal, since Dr. Valery Legasov (Jared Harris) is a man of science and not “the party.” By the second episode, Legasov is paired with a Soviet loyalist and bureaucrat, Boris Shcherbina (Stellan Skarsgård), a company man through and through, and they are tasked with assessing the situation and developing a response. As the two men work together to manage the meltdown, each learns devastating truths from the other, and their journey fundamentally alters the way they look at their country and their future in it.

Series writer/creator/executive producer Craig Mazin side-steps overly dramatic shots most disaster films and TV shows use as centerpieces, eschewing beauty for horror. There’s no run to the foreground, as an explosion ripples from behind, nor a poetic self-sacrifice moment where a character pushes another to safety. No, not here. There are heroics, and heroes, to be sure, but there’s nothing noble about their deaths, and any fleeting moments of admiration sink beneath the burden of incompetence and stupidity for lives that never needed to be lost.

It’s a crushing series to watch as a result, yet every step along the way it feels appropriate to the people and events. Drained of sentimentality, and replaced with the hellish realities of radiation sickness and bureaucratic inefficiency, “Chernobyl” is the very definition of transportive art. The clothing, set interiors, and even the waste bins shown in the program are period-appropriate, as is the unspooling of the mystery surrounding reactor number four’s explosion.

Amidst this chaos, there are small moments of victory and hope, like a wife’s fearless journey to be at her dying husband’s side, or a grizzled miner’s decision to work at ground zero with the full knowledge of the risks involved. The music doesn’t swell for this, though, and the sacrifices don’t always lead to an endgame that justifies the action. This is brutal TV, yet nothing less seems appropriate considering the subject matter. The world never saw (nor has it since seen) a man-made foul-up of this magnitude, so it feels important that the dramatization of these events should transpire with equally pitiless honesty lest it is repeated.

At its core, “Chernobyl” is a series about the pursuit of truth, and what that journey entails in a social system that values the control of information over the genuine pursuit of it. Whether it’s a president telling his people not to believe fake news, or a Soviet party official telling someone not to believe what they see (but rather what they’re being told), the parallels between the events in the show and the world of 2019 are unmistakable. As a character says in the series, “The real danger is that if we hear enough lies, then we no longer recognize the truth at all.”

There isn’t a wasted performance in any of the five episodes, starting with the masterful work of leads Harris, Skarsgård, and Emily Watson. Smaller roles, like those of Mark Lewis Jones as the general in charge of the military responders, or Alan Williams as the head of the KGB, are no less effective in small doses. Johan Renck, the Peak TV director known for his work on “The Walking Dead,” “Breaking Bad,” and “Vikings,” maintains a steady hand throughout the series, demonstrating what a clear vision and carefully plotted narrative beats can produce when handled with deliberate care behind the camera.

As the fifth and final episode comes to a close, the “how” and “why” of Chernobyl’s explosion and meltdown come into focus, even if the path towards avoiding such a thing in the future seems as fuzzy as ever. As long as corporations and governments put a higher premium on the presentation of “reality” than the truth of it, incidents like this have the potential to reoccur. The triumph of “Chernobyl” as a mini-series, then, has less to do with its uncanny ability to present an accurate picture of the past, and more about its prescient ability to gaze forward. [A+]