Chernobyl

The Sky man finally came a week ago.  I had planned to live without Sky in my new home, resolving not to line the Murdochs’ pockets.  But two things compounded me to sacrifice my values and change my mind.  The option of a life where I can take more control of what adverts I am forced to see was one of them, as ranted about in my post on Gogglebox.  Secondly, we’ve got the next Love Island around the corner and you can apparently only get ITV2 HD on Sky.  With all the access to boxsets my package promised me, I was buzzing to re-watch Game Of Thrones for treatment on here.  But no, that show doesn’t seem to be available at the moment.  Next on my list was something people had bleated on about in May when I was in full first-time buyer meltdown: Chernobyl.  Dealing with a meltdown of a different time, this miniseries dramatization of the 1986 disaster was held aloft as the best thing that anyone had ever seen, now ranked at number 5 in the IMDB list of Top Rated TV Shows (9.4).  With high hopes, I downloaded the first HD episode on my Sky Q.

I also drew the curtains (John Lewis, obviously) and put my phone out of reach, preparing to give the apparently untold quality of the drama my undivided attention.  Sadly, though, there were still about three minutes of adverts to wade through, but I was able to fast forward these immediately, once I finally worked out which button was which on my new remote in the darkened living room.  A week later, after limiting myself to no more than one episode per night of the five that make up this series, I have completed the boxset.  And I hereby attest to the incomparable greatness of Chernobyl – the TV programme, not the nuclear explosion.  The former made me punch the air and shout “worth it” at the inordinate expense of my OLED fifty-five incher, while the latter spread life-threatening levels of radioactivity of thousands of European square kilometres.  Let’s not confuse the two.

My attempts here to do any sort of justice to Chernobyl will fall short, but I’ll crack on with running through what makes this programme so remarkable all the same.  You’re already in the third paragraph so please don’t pretend you’ve got anything better to read.  Now, I was never that arsed by chemistry or physics at school, but you will come away from Chernobyl with quite a thorough understanding of nuclear fission.  I now know my boron rod from my graphite tip, but this isn’t down to my child-wonder levels of intelligence.  Thanks to Craig Mazin’s script (Craig a-Mazin, more like) multiple scenes contrive to see expert characters illuminate others on what’s gone wrong.  These happen in layers so that, once you’ve built a foundation of basic comprehension, you’re able to get your head around the sequence of events in greater detail.  It’s no mean feat: just as fission generates electricity as if from nothing, Chernobyl generates drama from our understanding of what should and shouldn’t happen in a nuclear reactor.  It would be worth watching for the educational benefits alone.

Linked to the above is the constant threat of radiation.  As if the explosion itself doesn’t build up enough tension, the action plays out against varying backdrops of radioactivity.  I don’t want to reveal spoilers, but one of my questions before watching was whether our main narrative was the build up to the disaster itself, or the consequences that followed its occurrence.  Through its dynamic and intelligent structure, the answer is that Chernobyl is both.  This allows a single event to be played for multiple crescendos of suspense so strong you’ll suddenly realise you’re hovering metres above your sofa rather snuggling into your scatter cushions.  Between these peaks, though, we have background radiation to prevent anyone from ever relaxing.  The erratic ticks of the Geiger counter begin to haunt you.  While this invisible threat is actually a very cost-effective form of horror when it comes to production budgets, depictions of its effects are disturbingly graphic.  This is not a relaxing watch.

But we’re not done.  Slathered over these layers of tense action is the amplifying factor of our Soviet setting.  Gilead-like in its control of every waking minute, this further threat to human survival rears its head several times, whether it’s Communist Party credibility getting in the way of the population’s best interests or the intense exchanges with head of the KGB (a spine-chilling performance from Alan Williams).  At odds with this workers’ and peasants’ utopia, which is already looking a little tired around edges and at odds with eighties fashion before the incident, is the fact that the all-powerful regime can draft in hundreds of thousands of expendable human conscripts to clear up its messes.  Chernobyl is able to relay the disaster’s impact at every level; whether a scene shows the evacuation of thousands or bristling dialogue between our heroes leading the clean-up, each detail is artfully executed and captured, from the constant smoking, the ill-fitting suits and the tacky interior designs to the suspicious glances, overuse of the word comrade and the suffocating lack of freedom under the state.

To recap, the subject matter, the writing, the setting and the production all give us top-quality drama, but the penultimate piece in our puzzle is the acting.  It’s very good (said in a British luvvie commenting at the theatre sort of voice).  Emily Watson displays why she is the sort of actor who makes any line sound like a masterpiece in her composite role as a key scientist risking her own safety to help solve Chernobyl.  Alongside her, Jared Harris (known best to me as the least sexy partner in Mad Men) commands our support as the individual who has to make the USSR realise the extent of the problem, Valery Legasov.  Each cigarette he lights is a manifestation of another realm of human exhaustion.  We’ve also got a Skarsgård (Stellan) doing his best gravelly-voiced military old man routine, completing the trinity of our three central parts.  Alongside them, a retinue of faces you’ll recognise from all sorts of places bring to life the rest of Soviet society on the Belarussian-Ukrainian border and in Moscow.

Finally, the structure.  To build on my earlier point, this is a masterclass in drawing from a singular horrific moment to drag us to the edge of our seats and beyond for five hour-long episodes.  This is TV-making at its best.  Sure, maybe it could have been rushed through as a feature film, but I’d only have fallen asleep (though I made it through Blue Story and everyone needs to see that too).  We’re able to take our time building up not just the setting, the period and the tension, but our longer format allows a depth of detail that enhances the whole drama.  An earnest review is a rare occurrence on this blog, but I wouldn’t be lying if I said that I’m in two minds about indulging in a second viewing altogether, such was the level to which Chernobyl impressed me.  Though, perhaps impressed is the wrong word.  It chilled me: a nightmarish scenario that comes into being when a nation has the wrong leaders.