It's The Bomb

I finally got around to watching HBO's Chernobyl, the show that won 10 Emmys, including Outstanding Limited Series. What held me back for so long was that I already know the basic story, and it's really depressing.  But the show is quite well done, and worth watching.

I don't know if it's accurate in every historical detail, but Chernobyl is certainly compelling.  It explains, with some (but not too much) technical detail, just what happened in the nuclear disaster of 1986, and its aftermath.  The main characters are Valery Legasov (Jared Harris), the nuclear scientist brought in to deal with the catastrophe, Boris Shcherbina (Stellan Skarsgard), the bureaucrat in charge of the situation and Ulana Khomyuk (Emily Watson), a nuclear physicist who's actually a composite character based on the many physicists who worked on the problem.

But we also meet a lot of side characters--the workers at the plant, the firefighters who deal with the immediate problem, the miners who dig a tunnel to deal with the meltdown, and numerous others called in to clear up the mess (including a military detail that does nothing but shoot contaminated animals so they can be buried in cement).

There's the explanation of the nuclear problem itself--how the plant exploded--and, maybe more important, the stifling communist bureaucracy that helped guarantee the worst.  Every bureaucracy tries to protect itself, but when it takes over a country and becomes the only power recognized, disaster is waiting to happen.

The acting is solid throughout, with special plaudits to Skarsgard as a timeserver at first not convinced the problem is worth worrying about but who comes to understand just what is happening, physically and politically. (And who would die prematurely, like so many others, due to the radiation he was exposed to.)