OT: Chernobyl on HBO
I haven’t seen any posts on the board about the show but I figure a large number of people are watching given how successful the miniseries has been for HBO.
Personally it has been the most effecting thing I have watched in a long time and I already went back and rewatched the first three episodes over the weekend. I think the acting is phenomenal and the writing and directing have also been great. I know a few things were exaggerated such as the size of the explosion if the core hit the bubbler pool below the reactor, but they have mostly stayed true to what happened. Terrifying stuff and I like that they focused on the “cost of lies” rather than just making individual people the villains.
Tldr: what has the board thought about the show?
The show is much moreso a study of authoritarian bureaucracy that caused and exacerbated the public harm in so many ways.
Appointments/decisions based on loyalty over competence are hardly unique to communism or even governments.
Who's romanticizing communism? Nobody that I know. I do know a number of people who don't understand the difference between communism and democratic socialism.
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I hang out on reddit too and I think there's a decent chunk of 20-somethings who romanticize communism. I see it fairly often over there. Hard to tell what the real percentage is on the internet though, but I would imagine it's small
Love the show. Acting is great, writing is superb, and you really feel the tension in each and every scene. Some pretty disturbing views of the effects of radiation exposure as well.
Harris and Skarsgard are phenomenal together.
On IMDB it's currently user rated as the #1 TV show of all-time (9.6 rating).
I cancelled HBO after GoT, but will resubscribe this summer to binge Chernobyl and the second season of Big Little Lies.
Its all time rating this early into the show is irrelevant. GoT would've been the all time highest rated IMBD show but the final season tanked its rating.
I love the show. Excellent mixture of the science and the politics evolving into the shit show.
Absolutely love it. I highly recommend it to anyone who may be on the fence.
am 51 was a senior in high school when this happened...... I wrote a paper in college right before the fall of the wall....... this was a totally shitfuck....
when you think of American heroism.... think of men knowing they are going to die..... but they do it for their country...... the miners are spot on.... they were the meanest sobs on the planet...... they saved ..... basically the planet.....
Exactly. Don’t care that the Soviets were our rivals. Humanity owes those men and their families a debt that can never be repaid. Without them, how many more hundreds of thousands die? How many millions? How much of Eastern Europe would’ve been completely wiped out and uninhabitable for thousands of years?
They went in there KNOWING they were dead men. Their death would not be painless. And they went in anyway.
They talked about the miners a bit on the Chernobyl podcast and if I remember correctly they didn't save anything. There was a chance that the radioactivity melt through and infect the river water but it never got to that point. Those miners likely lost years of life and had serious health problems to create a safeguard against the possibility of more widespread disaster. The threat was just too great to not be addressed.
are you..... mgoshoe....
There used to be a dude here whose handle was ellipses man. I think he's back.
Incredible show.
Radiation poisoning is 100% the worst way to die. Episode 3 was tough to watch.
was terrible to watch
I kept watching those guys looking directly into the core and thinking “jump in, man. It’ll be faster.”
Think of all those puppers that caught a bullet in E4, broke my damn heart
I like it. I liked the head coal miner the best.
Yeah. He took no shit at all. Him strolling up to the government officials buck naked and acting like it was nothing was hilarious.
The honesty and bluntness, is very refreshing. No BS... just cuts to the chase, and says how it is. I do miss people like these, in society, where it seems now the newer generation are a bunch of sob sister who do no wrong.
lol, the younger generations have plenty of people who tell it like it is. There's room for telling it like it is without being an asshole. The head miner did just that. Not sure why this has to be a generational issue.
As a 41 year old, I grow tired of this lazy, hawt take. Every generation gets criticized when they are in their teens and 20s. The fucking baby boomers said the same shit about Gen x-ers. I enlisted in the Army at 33 in 2011, then went back to the University of Toledo in 2017 to finish my degree. I feel very qualified to comment on the younger generation and they are no different than any other generation. They are full of bright, empathetic, ass kicking, knowledgeable people. They also have their share of imbeciles.
The problem, not only with the young folks, but us old folks as well, is that the imbeciles get most of the attention.
Not trying to kick off a flame war, just saying, don’t paint with such a broad brush.
The lack of self awareness of how your generation fucked the planet is hilarious.
Oh right....one generation did that. And if put in the same position current generations would have done much better than their forebears. Well sure, of course, no doubt.
I've mentioned this before, but I highly recommend "Midnight in Chernobyl" by Adam Higginbotham as companion reading to the miniseries. As dramatizations go, the HBO version is almost perfect, with the set design and writing absolutely on point with the era.
But the book really fleshes out the background in party politics and Soviet nuclear engineering so that you can make better sense of the explosion as an inevitability rather than an accident.
I have mixed feelings about nuclear power as an energy source ((independent of this incident or Fukushima), but it's almost impossible to comprehend how narrowly a continental crisis was averted.
I agree about the continental crisis, even global really. There were a few bonafide heroes in that incident that saved millions of lives.
Anyone interested should also read the recent book "Midnight in Chernobyl" (2019) which goes into more detail about the science behind the reactor and what went wrong. Not surprisingly, the movie takes some liberties with the sequence of events though overall it's doing a great job of dramatizing the immensity of the disaster and the horror of radiation exposure.
edit: oops, was beaten to it by a few minutes! Take this as a second recommendation for the book.
I also recommend the podcast “the Chernobyl podcast” which the series creator, writer, and producer goes on after every episode and goes into further details about the series
I remember seeing trailers for it before it started. Got immediately excited. I've always been interested in what happened there, but wasn't born until a year after. I think they've done an incredible job covering all of the different angles involved in it.
Based on your recommendations, OP, and what others are posting, l just tuned in to the first episode on HBO (original air date 5/6/19) and am going to record the other 3 episodes tonight and tomorrow.
Popcorn ready!
People still record? Pretty sure everything HBO has is On Demand.
It started out slow but it is so good now. God Bless those people that risked their lives to save everyone else, just like our veterans.
Go Red, White, and Blue!
Haven't watched this series yet but from what I know of the disaster, this is a perfect example of "the coverup is worse than the crime." Thousands of Russian workers were exposed to lethal doses of radiation in the cleanup effort, and much of it was due to the fact that the soviets were rushing to get it covered up.
I thought a show on something I already know about couldn't be entertaining, and boy was i wrong. Such a good start to the series.
Apollo 13 and titanic are two more examples that immediately come to mind. Many now say that titanic sucked, but it was hugely successful. Bridge of Spies is another. You should also check out The Big Short.
Another show that comes to mind was "Waco" which was a mini-series on the Paramount network last year. I highly recommend it, and it's got an A+ cast all around.
Bridge of spies is one of those movies I can watch every time i see it on tv
The Soviets, upon her arrival, placed Martha Hansen in Pripyat because of its relatively well stocked store shelves and other urban pseudo amenities.... it was a Russian version of a consolation prize. Consequently, she was the only tenant in her building with experience in hastened departures and accordingly, offered needed assistance to her comrades.
Have not watched it, but according to a review I read the movie says "estimates of the number of people who have died [as a result of the Chernobyl accident] range from 4000 to 93000."
This is incorrect as the UN estimate of 4000 deaths from Chernobyl is not an estimate of people who have died, it is an estimate that includes the total number of people who may eventually die (but haven't yet) as a result of the disaster.
Again, I haven't watched it, but my impression is that it's sensationalistic and gives a false impression of the dangers of nuclear compared to any other similarly capable means of generating electricity.
I would recommend you watch it. The miniseries is not about scaring people about nuclear power. I will let everyone draw their own conclusions about the risk vis a vis other power sources.
This is more about how institutions fail. One of things I think they do a great job of is showing how all aspects of the USSR contributed to this being much worse than it should have been. From covering up information about the reactor’s known design flaws, to the removal of key safety measures during the test, the lack of expertise among various workers, the delayed evacuation. This shows the total failure of the government to protect their people. I also appreciate them not blaming it all on Dyatlov like the soviets tried to do initially.
The very failings of their government actually made the soviets perhaps the best to deal with the accident. They had no problem sending people to their death. It is unknowable how the US government would have handled that accident if it were to have happened here, but sending people to their death to try and stop it would not have gone over as easily here. This is not a praise of their government or a knock on ours. Dealing with these issues is what has been so powerful about the show. It the culture that creates the problem but that same culture makes them unique in how they attack the problem.
I also highly recommend the companion podcast.
The Soviet Gov't said that only 31 people dies as a result of the accident. They don't include the radiation sickness related deaths that happened days/weeks/months/years later. They don't include the cancer deaths from off-spring of pregnant people. They don't include birth defects. 'Midnight in Chernobyl' explains it - they wrote in medical records that problems 'weren't related to ionizing radiation'.
The danger was/is as real as the coverup ever was.
There you go again, making the case why you shouldn't be allowed to teach children anything at all.
The Chernobyl miniseries is absolutely fantastic. One of the best things I’ve ever watched in my life. Everything about it, acting, direction, sound editing, location scouting, etc...everything is so incredible. So gripping, painful, scary, angering... it illicits so much. Top notch television.
(Started typing this and then got drunk at a bbq, sorry)
Looks like there are nothing but positive comments so far. I have to offer a counter-opinion. I think the (real life) story is fascinating but the hbo show leaves much to be desired.
Im through three episodes. So far most of the show has been the producers “toying” with the audience as far as which individuals involved immediately knew the severity, which ones were hiding the severity for political reasons, and some who are apparently truely naive.
However the character development is kind of weak. For example, when the minister holds the meeting in the bunker, the production implies that some guys in the room are trying to cover up the severity. But the production has little depth as far as developing individual characters, and their stance (naive, coverup, or aware) on the severity. There is too much implied, left to the viewers imagination, and not enough development. Not sure the best way to explain what I mean, but the motivations aren’t really developed that well.
Also, the scientist who is trying to “warn” everyone is kind of a played out theme. By the third episode, he’s basically calling the shots on the containment effort. It’s not different than tons of other movies like, say, margin call where only the kid analyst knows the severity of the banks problems.
The show is also very thin on technical details. The only thing they’ve explained so far is that graphite goes in the core, and finding graphite on the rooftops indicates that the core exploded. Just feels very weak and watered down
So in sum, a very interesting subject but it’s portrayed by a show that I found rather weak.
They explain more about the technical details in episode 4. Part of the problem is that there was a fog of war around the accident where nobody had a full picture of what actually happened. So if they explain too much early on it wouldn’t have been accurate. Also the technical details are incredibly complicated. I struggled to understand what was happening when I read further into how the explosion occurred. If they went into too much detail they would have had a hard time telling the story to the audience.
Fair enough, I’ll be open minded. I planned on finishing the series anyways. I didn’t necessarily want a treatise on nuclear reactions. My point rather was that the show lacks in many departments, including technical info. I guess I just found the first three espisodes to be worthless repeating of the theme “does this guy get it”
The show is more a dramatized documentary than a made for TV entertainment event. There is no character development to be had because it's about the disaster/response and the state's reactions to it, its not about the characters themselves. The 'scientific know-it-all' you complain about is a real person (Valerie Lagosov), and he really did do everything he's been shown to do. The other scientist, played by the woman, is an amalgam of the entire scientific community - because that entire community across Russia was involved.
In real life, pretty much all of the main characters, were dead within 10 years of the accident.