🕷️ Crawler Inspector

URL Lookup

Direct Parameter Lookup

Raw Queries and Responses

1. Shard Calculation

Query:

Response:

Calculated Shard: 84 (from laksa072)

2. Crawled Status Check

Query:

curl -X POST \
  'http://laksa084.int.ahrefs:8124/' \
  -H 'Content-Type: text/plain' \
  -H 'X-ClickHouse-Database: crawler3' \
  -H 'Authorization: Basic YXBpOg==' \
  -d 'SELECT getAhrefsURLFromUnparsed(src_unparsed) AS found_url, ifNull(toUnixTimestamp(download_stamp), 0) AS crawl_time, ifNull(toUnixTimestamp(props_url_first_seen), 0) AS first_indexed_time, download_http_code AS http_code, src_unparsed AS src_unparsed, src_root_hash AS src_root_hash, history_drop_reason AS history_drop_reason, meta_title AS meta_title, meta_descriptions AS meta_descriptions, attrs_boilerpipe_text AS attrs_boilerpipe_text, attrs_markdown AS attrs_markdown, attrs_readable_markdown AS attrs_readable_markdown, meta_canonical AS meta_canonical FROM crawler3.page_info_local FINAL PREWHERE (src_root_hash, src_unparsed) IN ((getAhrefsRootHashFromUnparsed(getAhrefsUnparsedNoserviceFromURL(\'https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/03/arts/television/review-chernobyl-hbo.html\')), getAhrefsUnparsedNoserviceFromURL(\'https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/03/arts/television/review-chernobyl-hbo.html\'))) FORMAT JSONEachRow'

Response:

{"found_url":"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2019\/05\/03\/arts\/television\/review-chernobyl-hbo.html","crawl_time":1770735681,"first_indexed_time":1556917013,"http_code":200,"src_unparsed":"com,nytimes!www,\/2019\/05\/03\/arts\/television\/review-chernobyl-hbo.html s443","src_root_hash":"4566504020376537684","history_drop_reason":null,"meta_title":"Review: ‘Chernobyl,’ the Disaster Movie - The New York Times","meta_descriptions":["HBO’s “Chernobyl” takes a melodramatic, reductionist approach in recounting history’s worst nuclear disaster."],"attrs_boilerpipe_text":"Advertisement\nSKIP ADVERTISEMENT\nThe five-part mini-series “Chernobyl” takes the story of the real-life disaster and turns it into a creaky and conventional disaster movie.\nCredit...\nHBO\nMay 3, 2019\nHow do you dramatize a great big mess? The 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster is a subject full of gripping detail and historical and scientific import. But as a story, it’s hard to get your arms around — sprawling and repetitious, dependent on arcane particulars of physics and engineering, marked by failures to act and by large-scale action that accomplishes nothing.\n“Chernobyl,” a five-part mini-series\nstarting Monday on HBO\n(in coproduction with the British network Sky), takes what you could call a Soviet approach to telling the tale. This is incongruous, since one of the messages of the program is that Soviet approaches don’t work. But there it is: the imposition of a simple narrative on history, the twisting of events to create one-dimensional heroes and villains, the broad-brush symbolism.\nOf course the techniques of Soviet propaganda bore a lot of similarity to the techniques of Hollywood. And in “Chernobyl,” the writer Craig Mazin (“The Hangover” Parts II and III) and the director Johan Renck take an event unlike any other in human history and turn it into a creaky and conventional, if longer than usual, disaster movie.\nMazin, who created the series, begins (after a short prologue) in the moments after the explosion that destroyed the newest of the four reactors at the Chernobyl power station, in what is now Ukraine. It’s a disorienting, compelling sequence — like the operators of the plant, we don’t know what has just happened, and we helplessly follow along as they blunder through the flaming wreckage on fruitless tasks, absorbing tremendous doses of radiation that will kill them within weeks.\nFrom there, the show moves along in extended vignettes, hitting the familiar high points of the Chernobyl story. A government commission is formed, the company town of Pripyat is evacuated, and firefighters and engineers die horrible deaths in the radiation wards of Moscow’s Hospital No. 6. Soldiers and workers conscripted from all over the Soviet Union undertake a series of deadly projects that have attained mythical status: the relief-valve mission, the digging of the heat-exchange chamber, the clearing of the roof of Unit 3.\nMazin ends with a potentially clever device: using testimony at the\nshow trial of the plant’s supervisors\nas a way to circle back and finally recount the story’s beginning, the botched safety test that led to the explosion. But the scene doesn’t have the force it should, because like much of what has come before, it takes fictional license over the line into contrivance and melodrama.\nLooking for a tragic hero to center the story on, Mazin has chosen the nuclear physicist Valery Legasov (Jared Harris), in part, perhaps, because his experience with Chernobyl drove him to suicide. Centrally involved in the response to the disaster, Legasov was mostly a good apparatchik, hewing to the party line that operator error and not flaws in Soviet reactor design led to the explosion.\nLegasov recanted before his death, in interviews made possible by the rapid progress of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika. In “Chernobyl,” however, Mazin puts Legasov on the witness stand at the trial and, in a stroke of pure fantasy, has him boldly denounce Soviet corner-cutting and secrecy, after which he’s hauled into a back room by the K.G.B.\nThe transformation of Legasov into a daring whistle-blower and martyr, complete with a courtroom apotheosis out of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” is just one instance of the show’s propensity toward Hollywood inflation — to show us things that didn’t happen. The workers who volunteer to enter the reactor building to open water valves do so in “Spartacus” style, solemnly standing and reciting their names. The coal miners brought in to excavate beneath the superheated nuclear core flout the radiation levels by working in the nude. A tall column of black smoke pours from the reactor for days after the explosion, rather than the small clouds of white vapor that escaped in real life.\nThe biggest and most artificial contrivance is the creation of a fictional character, a Belarusian scientist played by Emily Watson who takes a suspicious radiation reading in Minsk and magically, preposterously takes over the story. She’s everywhere at the same time, forcing herself onto the investigatory commission, sitting in on meetings with Gorbachev, raiding government archives, interviewing engineers in their hospital beds, single-handedly uncovering the secret history of the faulty reactor. (If Mazin wanted a prominent female character to leaven a story dominated by men, why did he leave out\nMaria Protsenko, the architect who designed Pripyat\nand supervised its evacuation?)\nIn the course of five hours, Mazin name-checks most of the pertinent facts of the story. But his cheap theatrics — including hilarious setups in which Boris Shcherbina (Stellan Skarsgard), the deputy prime minister in charge of energy, asks questions like “How does a nuclear reactor work?” so that Legasov can explain it for us — detract from the real tragedy of the story. So does the constant sense of foreboding reinforced by the buzzing Geiger-like noises on the soundtrack, and the prevalence of stoic-peasant and menacing-strongman Soviet stereotypes.\nAt a time when the documentary mini-series is probably the strongest, most interesting area of television, it’s too bad that Alex Gibney or Amy Berg didn’t get to Chernobyl first.\nChernobyl\nMonday on HBO\nA version of this article appears in print on\nMay 4, 2019\n, Section C, Page 3 of the New York edition with the headline: A Disaster Creakily Retold\n.\nOrder Reprints\n|\nToday’s Paper\n|\nSubscribe\nRelated Content\nMore in Television\nMark Blinch\/Reuters\nComedy Central\nChristopher Barr\/Netflix\nEditors’ Picks\nKelly Marshall for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Samantha Seneviratne. Prop Stylist: Paige Hicks.\nLaurel Golio for The New York Times\nTrending in The Times\nIllustration by Rebecca Chew\/The New York Times\nNatasha Campos\/Getty Images For Mark Markiplier\nImage by James Hill for The New York Times\nIllustration by Christa Jarrold\nImage by Alexandre Louvenaz\nLora Reynolds\nLauren DeCicca for The New York Times\nBen Hickey\nAdvertisement\nSKIP ADVERTISEMENT","attrs_markdown":"[Skip to content](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2019\/05\/03\/arts\/television\/review-chernobyl-hbo.html#site-content)[Skip to site index](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2019\/05\/03\/arts\/television\/review-chernobyl-hbo.html#site-index)\n\nSearch & Section Navigation\n\nSection Navigation\n\nSearch\n\n[Television](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/section\/arts\/television)\n\n[Log in](https:\/\/myaccount.nytimes.com\/auth\/login?response_type=cookie&client_id=vi&redirect_uri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2Fsubscription%2Fonboarding-offer%3FcampaignId%3D7JFJX%26EXIT_URI%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fwww.nytimes.com%252F2019%252F05%252F03%252Farts%252Ftelevision%252Freview-chernobyl-hbo.html&asset=masthead)\n\nTuesday, February 10, 2026\n\n[Today’s Paper](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/section\/todayspaper)\n\n[What to Watch](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/spotlight\/what-to-watch)\n\n- [Oscar Nominees: Where to Stream](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/01\/22\/movies\/oscar-nominees-2026-how-to-watch.html)\n- [‘The Muppet Show’](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/02\/03\/arts\/television\/review-the-muppet-show.html)\n- [‘Solo Mio’](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/02\/02\/movies\/solo-mio-review.html)\n- [‘Starman’](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/02\/04\/movies\/review-starman-cosmos-gentry-lee.html)\n- [‘Nadja’](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/02\/04\/movies\/nadja-bam-brooklyn-restoration.html)\n- [‘Melania’](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/01\/30\/movies\/melania-trump-movie-review.html)\n\nAdvertisement\n\n[SKIP ADVERTISEMENT](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2019\/05\/03\/arts\/television\/review-chernobyl-hbo.html#after-top)\n\nSupported by\n\n[SKIP ADVERTISEMENT](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2019\/05\/03\/arts\/television\/review-chernobyl-hbo.html#after-sponsor)\n# Review: ‘Chernobyl,’ the Disaster Movie\n- Share full article\n\n![](https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2019\/05\/03\/arts\/03chernobyl\/merlin_154186002_b59e03bb-57a5-4182-905d-80d655d35b5b-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale)\n\nThe five-part mini-series “Chernobyl” takes the story of the real-life disaster and turns it into a creaky and conventional disaster movie.Credit...HBO\n\nBy [Mike Hale](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/by\/mike-hale)\n\n- May 3, 2019\n\nHow do you dramatize a great big mess? The 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster is a subject full of gripping detail and historical and scientific import. But as a story, it’s hard to get your arms around — sprawling and repetitious, dependent on arcane particulars of physics and engineering, marked by failures to act and by large-scale action that accomplishes nothing.\n\n“Chernobyl,” a five-part mini-series [starting Monday on HBO](https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=s9APLXM9Ei8) (in coproduction with the British network Sky), takes what you could call a Soviet approach to telling the tale. This is incongruous, since one of the messages of the program is that Soviet approaches don’t work. But there it is: the imposition of a simple narrative on history, the twisting of events to create one-dimensional heroes and villains, the broad-brush symbolism.\n\nOf course the techniques of Soviet propaganda bore a lot of similarity to the techniques of Hollywood. And in “Chernobyl,” the writer Craig Mazin (“The Hangover” Parts II and III) and the director Johan Renck take an event unlike any other in human history and turn it into a creaky and conventional, if longer than usual, disaster movie.\n\nMazin, who created the series, begins (after a short prologue) in the moments after the explosion that destroyed the newest of the four reactors at the Chernobyl power station, in what is now Ukraine. It’s a disorienting, compelling sequence — like the operators of the plant, we don’t know what has just happened, and we helplessly follow along as they blunder through the flaming wreckage on fruitless tasks, absorbing tremendous doses of radiation that will kill them within weeks.\n\nFrom there, the show moves along in extended vignettes, hitting the familiar high points of the Chernobyl story. A government commission is formed, the company town of Pripyat is evacuated, and firefighters and engineers die horrible deaths in the radiation wards of Moscow’s Hospital No. 6. Soldiers and workers conscripted from all over the Soviet Union undertake a series of deadly projects that have attained mythical status: the relief-valve mission, the digging of the heat-exchange chamber, the clearing of the roof of Unit 3.\n\nMazin ends with a potentially clever device: using testimony at the [show trial of the plant’s supervisors](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1987\/07\/30\/world\/chernobyl-officials-are-sentenced-to-labor-camp.html) as a way to circle back and finally recount the story’s beginning, the botched safety test that led to the explosion. But the scene doesn’t have the force it should, because like much of what has come before, it takes fictional license over the line into contrivance and melodrama.\n\nLooking for a tragic hero to center the story on, Mazin has chosen the nuclear physicist Valery Legasov (Jared Harris), in part, perhaps, because his experience with Chernobyl drove him to suicide. Centrally involved in the response to the disaster, Legasov was mostly a good apparatchik, hewing to the party line that operator error and not flaws in Soviet reactor design led to the explosion.\n\nLegasov recanted before his death, in interviews made possible by the rapid progress of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika. In “Chernobyl,” however, Mazin puts Legasov on the witness stand at the trial and, in a stroke of pure fantasy, has him boldly denounce Soviet corner-cutting and secrecy, after which he’s hauled into a back room by the K.G.B.\n\nThe transformation of Legasov into a daring whistle-blower and martyr, complete with a courtroom apotheosis out of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” is just one instance of the show’s propensity toward Hollywood inflation — to show us things that didn’t happen. The workers who volunteer to enter the reactor building to open water valves do so in “Spartacus” style, solemnly standing and reciting their names. The coal miners brought in to excavate beneath the superheated nuclear core flout the radiation levels by working in the nude. A tall column of black smoke pours from the reactor for days after the explosion, rather than the small clouds of white vapor that escaped in real life.\n\n## Editors’ Picks\n[![](https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2026\/02\/06\/multimedia\/06FD-STAFF-SNOWSTORM-chickenadobo-blgh\/06FD-STAFF-SNOWSTORM-chickenadobo-blgh-thumbLarge.jpg)What Our Staff Likes to Cook When It’s Freezing Out](https:\/\/cooking.nytimes.com\/article\/snowstorm-recipes)\n\n[![](https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2026\/02\/09\/multimedia\/09re-location-odonnell-05-gqwh\/09re-location-odonnell-05-gqwh-thumbLarge.jpg)A Designer Moves Upstairs — and Starts Over](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/02\/09\/realestate\/greenwich-village-condo-kyle-odonnell.html)\n\n[![](https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2026\/02\/14\/magazine\/14mag-ethicist\/14mag-ethicist-thumbLarge.jpg)My Cousin Is About to Become Homeless. How Much Should I Give Up for Him?](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/02\/07\/magazine\/cousin-homeless-ethics.html)\n\nAdvertisement\n\n[SKIP ADVERTISEMENT](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2019\/05\/03\/arts\/television\/review-chernobyl-hbo.html#after-pp_edpick)\n\nThe biggest and most artificial contrivance is the creation of a fictional character, a Belarusian scientist played by Emily Watson who takes a suspicious radiation reading in Minsk and magically, preposterously takes over the story. She’s everywhere at the same time, forcing herself onto the investigatory commission, sitting in on meetings with Gorbachev, raiding government archives, interviewing engineers in their hospital beds, single-handedly uncovering the secret history of the faulty reactor. (If Mazin wanted a prominent female character to leaven a story dominated by men, why did he leave out [Maria Protsenko, the architect who designed Pripyat](https:\/\/www.atlasobscura.com\/articles\/chernobyl-pripyat-before-disaster) and supervised its evacuation?)\n\nIn the course of five hours, Mazin name-checks most of the pertinent facts of the story. But his cheap theatrics — including hilarious setups in which Boris Shcherbina (Stellan Skarsgard), the deputy prime minister in charge of energy, asks questions like “How does a nuclear reactor work?” so that Legasov can explain it for us — detract from the real tragedy of the story. So does the constant sense of foreboding reinforced by the buzzing Geiger-like noises on the soundtrack, and the prevalence of stoic-peasant and menacing-strongman Soviet stereotypes.\n\nAt a time when the documentary mini-series is probably the strongest, most interesting area of television, it’s too bad that Alex Gibney or Amy Berg didn’t get to Chernobyl first.\n\nChernobyl  \nMonday on HBO\n\nA version of this article appears in print on May 4, 2019, Section C, Page 3 of the New York edition with the headline: A Disaster Creakily Retold. [Order Reprints](https:\/\/nytimes.wrightsmedia.com\/) \\| [Today’s Paper](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/section\/todayspaper) \\| [Subscribe](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/subscriptions\/Multiproduct\/lp8HYKU.html?campaignId=48JQY)\n\nSee more on: [HBO, Inc.](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/topic\/company\/home-box-office-inc)\n\n- Share full article\n\n### Related Coverage\n[Looking Again at the Chernobyl Disaster April 3, 2019 ![Looking Again at the Chernobyl Disaster](https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2019\/04\/07\/books\/review\/07Crease2\/07Crease2-thumbLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale)](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2019\/04\/03\/books\/review\/adam-higginbotham-midnight-in-chernobyl.html?action=click&module=RelatedCoverage&pgtype=Article&region=Footer)\n\n[video Remembering Chernobyl April 26, 2016 ![Remembering Chernobyl](https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2016\/04\/27\/science\/27Chernobyl-Memorial\/27Chernobyl-Memorial-thumbLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale)](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/video\/world\/europe\/100000004361442\/remembering-chernobyl.html?action=click&module=RelatedCoverage&pgtype=Article&region=Footer)\n\n[Chernobyl Nuclear Accident (1986) March 23, 2011](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/topic\/subject\/chernobyl-nuclear-accident-1986?action=click&module=RelatedCoverage&pgtype=Article&region=Footer)\n\n***\n## Explore More in TV and Movies\n### Not sure what to watch next? We can help.\n***\n- **From Minor Muppet to TV’s Top Hog:** Miss Piggy began as a bit player, but a sassy attitude and a karate chop carried her to the pinnacle of pop culture. [A new Muppets special premieres](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/02\/04\/arts\/television\/miss-piggy-muppet-show.html).\n- **Jewish Comedy:** Is the golden era of Jewish comedy coming to an end? Not so fast. A new special from Raanan Hershberg shows how [charged times can make for funnier jokes](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/02\/03\/arts\/television\/jewish-comedy.html) involving anxiety over Israel, Gaza and antisemitism.\n- **Harry Melling:** The actor shed his image as Harry Potter’s cruel cousin, Dudley Dursley — and his clothes — to [star in the queer romance “Pillion.”](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/02\/04\/movies\/harry-melling-pillion.html)\n- **Stellan Skarsgard:** After a stroke four years ago, the actor has [changed how he approaches performances](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/02\/04\/movies\/stellan-skarsgard-sentimental-value.html), including one he’s become an awards favorite for, the Norwegian family drama “Sentimental Value.”\n- **‘ The Backbone of ‘****Bridgerton’** **Is Dance:** “There’s so much in the pomp and circumstance and the rules of the world that [comes through dance](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/02\/04\/arts\/dance\/bridgerton-waltz.html),” said Tom Verica, a director of the Netflix series.\n- **Streaming Guides:** If you are overwhelmed by the endless options, don’t despair — we put together the [best offerings](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/article\/best-movies-netflix.html) [on Netflix](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/article\/best-tv-shows-netflix.html), [Max](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/article\/best-movies-hbo-max.html), [Disney+](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/article\/best-tv-shows-movies-disney-plus.html), [Amazon Prime](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/article\/best-movies-amazon-prime.html) and [Hulu](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/article\/best-movies-shows-hulu.html) to make choosing your next binge a little easier.\n\n## Related Content\n### [More in Television](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/section\/arts\/television)\n- [The Super Bowl Ads, Ranked](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/02\/06\/arts\/television\/super-bowl-ads-ranked-2026.html)\n  \n  ![George Clooney pitches Grubhub in one of two Super Bowl ads directed by Yorgos Lanthimos.](https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2026\/02\/10\/arts\/06cul-superbowlads\/06cul-superbowlads-square640-v2.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale)\n- [Catherine O’Hara Died From Pulmonary Embolism, Death Certificate Says](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/02\/09\/movies\/catherine-ohara-cause-of-death.html)\n  \n  ![The actress Catherine O’Hara in 2024. She died on Jan. 30 at 71.](https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2026\/02\/09\/multimedia\/09cul-ohara-death-cause-wtlz\/09cul-ohara-death-cause-wtlz-square640.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale)\n  \n  Mark Blinch\/Reuters\n- [Jon Stewart Defends Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl Halftime Show](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/02\/10\/arts\/television\/late-night-bad-bunny.html)\n  \n  ![“I love that he thinks Bad Bunny is the one guy in the world that’s fluent in Spanish,” Jon Stewart said of President Trump.](https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2026\/02\/10\/arts\/10latenight\/10latenight-square640-v2.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale)\n  \n  Comedy Central\n- [The Best Movies and TV Shows Coming to Netflix in February](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/02\/03\/arts\/television\/netflix-new-february.html)\n  \n  ![From left, Caoilfhionn Dunne, Roisin Gallagher and Sinead Keenan in a scene from “How to Get to Heaven From Belfast.”](https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2026\/02\/03\/arts\/03cul-netflix-new\/03cul-netflix-new-square640-v2.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale)\n  \n  Christopher Barr\/Netflix\n\n### Editors’ Picks\n- [16 Easy Desserts for People Who Really, Really Love Chocolate](https:\/\/cooking.nytimes.com\/article\/easy-chocolate-dessert-recipes-valentines-day)\n  \n  ![Samantha Seneviratne’s turtle bars.](https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2026\/02\/06\/multimedia\/06FD-EASY-CHOCOLATE-DESSERTS-Turtle-bars-1-pgjb\/06FD-EASY-CHOCOLATE-DESSERTS-Turtle-bars-1-pgjb-square640.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale)\n  \n  Kelly Marshall for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Samantha Seneviratne. Prop Stylist: Paige Hicks.\n- [Does It Matter What I Wear to Work Out?](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/02\/09\/fashion\/workout-clothes-brands-exercise.html)\n  \n  ![](https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2026\/02\/09\/multimedia\/09askvanessa-kclv\/09askvanessa-kclv-square640.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale)\n  \n  Laurel Golio for The New York Times\n\n### Trending in The Times\n- [Stop Using Liquid Dishwasher Detergent](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/video\/smarter-living\/wirecutter\/100000010699991\/stop-using-liquid-dishwasher-detergent.html)\n  \n  ![](https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2026\/02\/09\/smarter-living\/wirecutter\/THUMB_260123_WC_WILI_DISHDETERGENT_WL_V6\/THUMB_260123_WC_WILI_DISHDETERGENT_WL_V6-square640.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale&width=350)\n- [Opinion: It’s Time for America to Admit That It Has a Marijuana Problem](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/02\/09\/opinion\/regulate-legalized-marijuana.html)\n  \n  ![](https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2026\/02\/09\/opinion\/09marijuana-editorial-image\/09marijuana-editorial-image-square640.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale&width=350)\n  \n  Illustration by Rebecca Chew\/The New York Times\n- [A YouTuber’s Film Beat ‘Melania’ at the Box Office. Here’s How.](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/02\/09\/movies\/markiplier-iron-lung-movie.html)\n  \n  ![Mark Fischbach, known as Markiplier, directed and funded “Iron Lung” himself.](https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2026\/02\/10\/multimedia\/09cul-youtube-movie-2-vbcj\/09cul-youtube-movie-2-vbcj-square640.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale&width=350)\n  \n  Natasha Campos\/Getty Images For Mark Markiplier\n- [Olympic P.S.A.: Do Not Jump for Joy While Wearing Your Medal](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/02\/09\/sports\/olympics-medals-broken-breezy-johnson.html)\n  \n  ![Breezy Johnson of the United States posing with her gold medal for downhill skiing at the medal ceremony on Sunday.](https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2026\/02\/09\/multimedia\/09xp-medals1-zcvg\/09xp-medals1-zcvg-square640.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale&width=350)\n  \n  Image by James Hill for The New York Times\n- [You Are Not Defined by Your Phone Number. It’s OK to Change It.](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/02\/10\/magazine\/changing-your-phone-number.html)\n  \n  ![](https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2026\/02\/15\/magazine\/15mag-LOR-image1\/15mag-LOR-image1-square640-v2.png?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale&width=350)\n  \n  Illustration by Christa Jarrold\n- [Opinion: Want More Babies? Abolish Commutes.](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/02\/09\/opinion\/fertility-rate-baby-work-from-home.html)\n  \n  ![](https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2026\/02\/09\/arts\/09lipman-still\/09lipman-still-square640.png?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale&width=350)\n  \n  Image by Alexandre Louvenaz\n- [These Birds Are of Different Feathers, but They Flock Together](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/02\/09\/science\/birds-preening-species-texas.html)\n  \n  ![An instance of interspecific allopreening, as ornithologists call it, between a crested caracara, right, and a black vulture in San Antonio.](https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2026\/02\/09\/multimedia\/09HS-tb-bird-friends-01-jtcp\/09HS-tb-bird-friends-01-jtcp-square640.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale&width=350)\n  \n  Lora Reynolds\n- [Seahawks’ Defense Dominates in Super Bowl Victory Over Patriots](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/video\/sports\/football\/100000010699276\/seahawks-defense-dominates-in-super-bowl-victory-over-patriots.html)\n  \n  ![](https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2026\/02\/09\/sports\/football\/08vid-athletic-superbowl-highlights\/08vid-athletic-superbowl-highlights-square640.png?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale&width=350)\n- [Farmers Made a Fortune on This Fruit. Now It Is Piling Up.](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/02\/10\/world\/asia\/durian-malaysia-china-demand.html)\n  \n  ![](https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2026\/01\/29\/multimedia\/00int-malaysia-durian-promo\/00int-malaysia-durian-01-wmzp-square640-v2.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale&width=350)\n  \n  Lauren DeCicca for The New York Times\n- [Book Review: Can You Match These Passionate Quotations to the Book Title?](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/interactive\/2026\/02\/09\/books\/review\/literary-love-lines.html)\n  \n  ![](https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2026\/02\/09\/books\/review\/00TBR-Quiz-LoveQuotes\/00TBR-LoveQuotes-square640.png?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale&width=350)\n  \n  Ben Hickey\n\nAdvertisement\n\n[SKIP ADVERTISEMENT](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2019\/05\/03\/arts\/television\/review-chernobyl-hbo.html#after-bottom)\n\n## Site Index\n[Go to Home Page »](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/)\n\nNews\n\n- [Home Page](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/)\n- 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ADVERTISEMENT](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2019\/05\/03\/arts\/television\/review-chernobyl-hbo.html#after-top)\n\n![](https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2019\/05\/03\/arts\/03chernobyl\/merlin_154186002_b59e03bb-57a5-4182-905d-80d655d35b5b-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale)\n\nThe five-part mini-series “Chernobyl” takes the story of the real-life disaster and turns it into a creaky and conventional disaster movie.Credit...HBO\n\n- May 3, 2019\n\nHow do you dramatize a great big mess? The 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster is a subject full of gripping detail and historical and scientific import. But as a story, it’s hard to get your arms around — sprawling and repetitious, dependent on arcane particulars of physics and engineering, marked by failures to act and by large-scale action that accomplishes nothing.\n\n“Chernobyl,” a five-part mini-series [starting Monday on HBO](https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=s9APLXM9Ei8) (in coproduction with the British network Sky), takes what you could call a Soviet approach to telling the tale. This is incongruous, since one of the messages of the program is that Soviet approaches don’t work. But there it is: the imposition of a simple narrative on history, the twisting of events to create one-dimensional heroes and villains, the broad-brush symbolism.\n\nOf course the techniques of Soviet propaganda bore a lot of similarity to the techniques of Hollywood. And in “Chernobyl,” the writer Craig Mazin (“The Hangover” Parts II and III) and the director Johan Renck take an event unlike any other in human history and turn it into a creaky and conventional, if longer than usual, disaster movie.\n\nMazin, who created the series, begins (after a short prologue) in the moments after the explosion that destroyed the newest of the four reactors at the Chernobyl power station, in what is now Ukraine. It’s a disorienting, compelling sequence — like the operators of the plant, we don’t know what has just happened, and we helplessly follow along as they blunder through the flaming wreckage on fruitless tasks, absorbing tremendous doses of radiation that will kill them within weeks.\n\nFrom there, the show moves along in extended vignettes, hitting the familiar high points of the Chernobyl story. A government commission is formed, the company town of Pripyat is evacuated, and firefighters and engineers die horrible deaths in the radiation wards of Moscow’s Hospital No. 6. Soldiers and workers conscripted from all over the Soviet Union undertake a series of deadly projects that have attained mythical status: the relief-valve mission, the digging of the heat-exchange chamber, the clearing of the roof of Unit 3.\n\nMazin ends with a potentially clever device: using testimony at the [show trial of the plant’s supervisors](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1987\/07\/30\/world\/chernobyl-officials-are-sentenced-to-labor-camp.html) as a way to circle back and finally recount the story’s beginning, the botched safety test that led to the explosion. But the scene doesn’t have the force it should, because like much of what has come before, it takes fictional license over the line into contrivance and melodrama.\n\nLooking for a tragic hero to center the story on, Mazin has chosen the nuclear physicist Valery Legasov (Jared Harris), in part, perhaps, because his experience with Chernobyl drove him to suicide. Centrally involved in the response to the disaster, Legasov was mostly a good apparatchik, hewing to the party line that operator error and not flaws in Soviet reactor design led to the explosion.\n\nLegasov recanted before his death, in interviews made possible by the rapid progress of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika. In “Chernobyl,” however, Mazin puts Legasov on the witness stand at the trial and, in a stroke of pure fantasy, has him boldly denounce Soviet corner-cutting and secrecy, after which he’s hauled into a back room by the K.G.B.\n\nThe transformation of Legasov into a daring whistle-blower and martyr, complete with a courtroom apotheosis out of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” is just one instance of the show’s propensity toward Hollywood inflation — to show us things that didn’t happen. The workers who volunteer to enter the reactor building to open water valves do so in “Spartacus” style, solemnly standing and reciting their names. The coal miners brought in to excavate beneath the superheated nuclear core flout the radiation levels by working in the nude. A tall column of black smoke pours from the reactor for days after the explosion, rather than the small clouds of white vapor that escaped in real life.\n\nThe biggest and most artificial contrivance is the creation of a fictional character, a Belarusian scientist played by Emily Watson who takes a suspicious radiation reading in Minsk and magically, preposterously takes over the story. She’s everywhere at the same time, forcing herself onto the investigatory commission, sitting in on meetings with Gorbachev, raiding government archives, interviewing engineers in their hospital beds, single-handedly uncovering the secret history of the faulty reactor. (If Mazin wanted a prominent female character to leaven a story dominated by men, why did he leave out [Maria Protsenko, the architect who designed Pripyat](https:\/\/www.atlasobscura.com\/articles\/chernobyl-pripyat-before-disaster) and supervised its evacuation?)\n\nIn the course of five hours, Mazin name-checks most of the pertinent facts of the story. But his cheap theatrics — including hilarious setups in which Boris Shcherbina (Stellan Skarsgard), the deputy prime minister in charge of energy, asks questions like “How does a nuclear reactor work?” so that Legasov can explain it for us — detract from the real tragedy of the story. So does the constant sense of foreboding reinforced by the buzzing Geiger-like noises on the soundtrack, and the prevalence of stoic-peasant and menacing-strongman Soviet stereotypes.\n\nAt a time when the documentary mini-series is probably the strongest, most interesting area of television, it’s too bad that Alex Gibney or Amy Berg didn’t get to Chernobyl first.\n\nChernobyl  \nMonday on HBO\n\nA version of this article appears in print on May 4, 2019, Section C, Page 3 of the New York edition with the headline: A Disaster Creakily Retold. [Order Reprints](https:\/\/nytimes.wrightsmedia.com\/) \\| [Today’s Paper](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/section\/todayspaper) \\| [Subscribe](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/subscriptions\/Multiproduct\/lp8HYKU.html?campaignId=48JQY)\n\n## Related Content\n[More in Television](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/section\/arts\/television)\n\n- ![George Clooney pitches Grubhub in one of two Super Bowl ads directed by Yorgos Lanthimos.](https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2026\/02\/10\/arts\/06cul-superbowlads\/06cul-superbowlads-square640-v2.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale)\n- ![The actress Catherine O’Hara in 2024. She died on Jan. 30 at 71.](https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2026\/02\/09\/multimedia\/09cul-ohara-death-cause-wtlz\/09cul-ohara-death-cause-wtlz-square640.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale)\n  \n  Mark Blinch\/Reuters\n- ![“I love that he thinks Bad Bunny is the one guy in the world that’s fluent in Spanish,” Jon Stewart said of President Trump.](https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2026\/02\/10\/arts\/10latenight\/10latenight-square640-v2.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale)\n  \n  Comedy Central\n- ![From left, Caoilfhionn Dunne, Roisin Gallagher and Sinead Keenan in a scene from “How to Get to Heaven From Belfast.”](https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2026\/02\/03\/arts\/03cul-netflix-new\/03cul-netflix-new-square640-v2.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale)\n  \n  Christopher Barr\/Netflix\n\nEditors’ Picks\n\n- ![Samantha Seneviratne’s turtle bars.](https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2026\/02\/06\/multimedia\/06FD-EASY-CHOCOLATE-DESSERTS-Turtle-bars-1-pgjb\/06FD-EASY-CHOCOLATE-DESSERTS-Turtle-bars-1-pgjb-square640.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale)\n  \n  Kelly Marshall for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Samantha Seneviratne. 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Boilerpipe Text	Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT The five-part mini-series “Chernobyl” takes the story of the real-life disaster and turns it into a creaky and conventional disaster movie. Credit... HBO May 3, 2019 How do you dramatize a great big mess? The 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster is a subject full of gripping detail and historical and scientific import. But as a story, it’s hard to get your arms around — sprawling and repetitious, dependent on arcane particulars of physics and engineering, marked by failures to act and by large-scale action that accomplishes nothing. “Chernobyl,” a five-part mini-series starting Monday on HBO (in coproduction with the British network Sky), takes what you could call a Soviet approach to telling the tale. This is incongruous, since one of the messages of the program is that Soviet approaches don’t work. But there it is: the imposition of a simple narrative on history, the twisting of events to create one-dimensional heroes and villains, the broad-brush symbolism. Of course the techniques of Soviet propaganda bore a lot of similarity to the techniques of Hollywood. And in “Chernobyl,” the writer Craig Mazin (“The Hangover” Parts II and III) and the director Johan Renck take an event unlike any other in human history and turn it into a creaky and conventional, if longer than usual, disaster movie. Mazin, who created the series, begins (after a short prologue) in the moments after the explosion that destroyed the newest of the four reactors at the Chernobyl power station, in what is now Ukraine. It’s a disorienting, compelling sequence — like the operators of the plant, we don’t know what has just happened, and we helplessly follow along as they blunder through the flaming wreckage on fruitless tasks, absorbing tremendous doses of radiation that will kill them within weeks. From there, the show moves along in extended vignettes, hitting the familiar high points of the Chernobyl story. A government commission is formed, the company town of Pripyat is evacuated, and firefighters and engineers die horrible deaths in the radiation wards of Moscow’s Hospital No. 6. Soldiers and workers conscripted from all over the Soviet Union undertake a series of deadly projects that have attained mythical status: the relief-valve mission, the digging of the heat-exchange chamber, the clearing of the roof of Unit 3. Mazin ends with a potentially clever device: using testimony at the show trial of the plant’s supervisors as a way to circle back and finally recount the story’s beginning, the botched safety test that led to the explosion. But the scene doesn’t have the force it should, because like much of what has come before, it takes fictional license over the line into contrivance and melodrama. Looking for a tragic hero to center the story on, Mazin has chosen the nuclear physicist Valery Legasov (Jared Harris), in part, perhaps, because his experience with Chernobyl drove him to suicide. Centrally involved in the response to the disaster, Legasov was mostly a good apparatchik, hewing to the party line that operator error and not flaws in Soviet reactor design led to the explosion. Legasov recanted before his death, in interviews made possible by the rapid progress of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika. In “Chernobyl,” however, Mazin puts Legasov on the witness stand at the trial and, in a stroke of pure fantasy, has him boldly denounce Soviet corner-cutting and secrecy, after which he’s hauled into a back room by the K.G.B. The transformation of Legasov into a daring whistle-blower and martyr, complete with a courtroom apotheosis out of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” is just one instance of the show’s propensity toward Hollywood inflation — to show us things that didn’t happen. The workers who volunteer to enter the reactor building to open water valves do so in “Spartacus” style, solemnly standing and reciting their names. The coal miners brought in to excavate beneath the superheated nuclear core flout the radiation levels by working in the nude. A tall column of black smoke pours from the reactor for days after the explosion, rather than the small clouds of white vapor that escaped in real life. The biggest and most artificial contrivance is the creation of a fictional character, a Belarusian scientist played by Emily Watson who takes a suspicious radiation reading in Minsk and magically, preposterously takes over the story. She’s everywhere at the same time, forcing herself onto the investigatory commission, sitting in on meetings with Gorbachev, raiding government archives, interviewing engineers in their hospital beds, single-handedly uncovering the secret history of the faulty reactor. (If Mazin wanted a prominent female character to leaven a story dominated by men, why did he leave out Maria Protsenko, the architect who designed Pripyat and supervised its evacuation?) In the course of five hours, Mazin name-checks most of the pertinent facts of the story. But his cheap theatrics — including hilarious setups in which Boris Shcherbina (Stellan Skarsgard), the deputy prime minister in charge of energy, asks questions like “How does a nuclear reactor work?” so that Legasov can explain it for us — detract from the real tragedy of the story. So does the constant sense of foreboding reinforced by the buzzing Geiger-like noises on the soundtrack, and the prevalence of stoic-peasant and menacing-strongman Soviet stereotypes. At a time when the documentary mini-series is probably the strongest, most interesting area of television, it’s too bad that Alex Gibney or Amy Berg didn’t get to Chernobyl first. Chernobyl Monday on HBO A version of this article appears in print on May 4, 2019 , Section C, Page 3 of the New York edition with the headline: A Disaster Creakily Retold . Order Reprints \| Today’s Paper \| Subscribe Related Content More in Television Mark Blinch/Reuters Comedy Central Christopher Barr/Netflix Editors’ Picks Kelly Marshall for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Samantha Seneviratne. Prop Stylist: Paige Hicks. Laurel Golio for The New York Times Trending in The Times Illustration by Rebecca Chew/The New York Times Natasha Campos/Getty Images For Mark Markiplier Image by James Hill for The New York Times Illustration by Christa Jarrold Image by Alexandre Louvenaz Lora Reynolds Lauren DeCicca for The New York Times Ben Hickey Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT
Markdown	[Skip to content](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/03/arts/television/review-chernobyl-hbo.html#site-content)[Skip to site index](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/03/arts/television/review-chernobyl-hbo.html#site-index) Search & Section Navigation Section Navigation Search [Television](https://www.nytimes.com/section/arts/television) [Log in](https://myaccount.nytimes.com/auth/login?response_type=cookie&client_id=vi&redirect_uri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2Fsubscription%2Fonboarding-offer%3FcampaignId%3D7JFJX%26EXIT_URI%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fwww.nytimes.com%252F2019%252F05%252F03%252Farts%252Ftelevision%252Freview-chernobyl-hbo.html&asset=masthead) Tuesday, February 10, 2026 [Today’s Paper](https://www.nytimes.com/section/todayspaper) [What to Watch](https://www.nytimes.com/spotlight/what-to-watch) - [Oscar Nominees: Where to Stream](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/22/movies/oscar-nominees-2026-how-to-watch.html) - [‘The Muppet Show’](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/03/arts/television/review-the-muppet-show.html) - [‘Solo Mio’](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/02/movies/solo-mio-review.html) - [‘Starman’](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/04/movies/review-starman-cosmos-gentry-lee.html) - [‘Nadja’](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/04/movies/nadja-bam-brooklyn-restoration.html) - [‘Melania’](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/30/movies/melania-trump-movie-review.html) Advertisement [SKIP ADVERTISEMENT](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/03/arts/television/review-chernobyl-hbo.html#after-top) Supported by [SKIP ADVERTISEMENT](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/03/arts/television/review-chernobyl-hbo.html#after-sponsor) # Review: ‘Chernobyl,’ the Disaster Movie - Share full article ![](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2019/05/03/arts/03chernobyl/merlin_154186002_b59e03bb-57a5-4182-905d-80d655d35b5b-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale) The five-part mini-series “Chernobyl” takes the story of the real-life disaster and turns it into a creaky and conventional disaster movie.Credit...HBO By [Mike Hale](https://www.nytimes.com/by/mike-hale) - May 3, 2019 How do you dramatize a great big mess? The 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster is a subject full of gripping detail and historical and scientific import. But as a story, it’s hard to get your arms around — sprawling and repetitious, dependent on arcane particulars of physics and engineering, marked by failures to act and by large-scale action that accomplishes nothing. “Chernobyl,” a five-part mini-series [starting Monday on HBO](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9APLXM9Ei8) (in coproduction with the British network Sky), takes what you could call a Soviet approach to telling the tale. This is incongruous, since one of the messages of the program is that Soviet approaches don’t work. But there it is: the imposition of a simple narrative on history, the twisting of events to create one-dimensional heroes and villains, the broad-brush symbolism. Of course the techniques of Soviet propaganda bore a lot of similarity to the techniques of Hollywood. And in “Chernobyl,” the writer Craig Mazin (“The Hangover” Parts II and III) and the director Johan Renck take an event unlike any other in human history and turn it into a creaky and conventional, if longer than usual, disaster movie. Mazin, who created the series, begins (after a short prologue) in the moments after the explosion that destroyed the newest of the four reactors at the Chernobyl power station, in what is now Ukraine. It’s a disorienting, compelling sequence — like the operators of the plant, we don’t know what has just happened, and we helplessly follow along as they blunder through the flaming wreckage on fruitless tasks, absorbing tremendous doses of radiation that will kill them within weeks. From there, the show moves along in extended vignettes, hitting the familiar high points of the Chernobyl story. A government commission is formed, the company town of Pripyat is evacuated, and firefighters and engineers die horrible deaths in the radiation wards of Moscow’s Hospital No. 6. Soldiers and workers conscripted from all over the Soviet Union undertake a series of deadly projects that have attained mythical status: the relief-valve mission, the digging of the heat-exchange chamber, the clearing of the roof of Unit 3. Mazin ends with a potentially clever device: using testimony at the [show trial of the plant’s supervisors](https://www.nytimes.com/1987/07/30/world/chernobyl-officials-are-sentenced-to-labor-camp.html) as a way to circle back and finally recount the story’s beginning, the botched safety test that led to the explosion. But the scene doesn’t have the force it should, because like much of what has come before, it takes fictional license over the line into contrivance and melodrama. Looking for a tragic hero to center the story on, Mazin has chosen the nuclear physicist Valery Legasov (Jared Harris), in part, perhaps, because his experience with Chernobyl drove him to suicide. Centrally involved in the response to the disaster, Legasov was mostly a good apparatchik, hewing to the party line that operator error and not flaws in Soviet reactor design led to the explosion. Legasov recanted before his death, in interviews made possible by the rapid progress of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika. In “Chernobyl,” however, Mazin puts Legasov on the witness stand at the trial and, in a stroke of pure fantasy, has him boldly denounce Soviet corner-cutting and secrecy, after which he’s hauled into a back room by the K.G.B. The transformation of Legasov into a daring whistle-blower and martyr, complete with a courtroom apotheosis out of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” is just one instance of the show’s propensity toward Hollywood inflation — to show us things that didn’t happen. The workers who volunteer to enter the reactor building to open water valves do so in “Spartacus” style, solemnly standing and reciting their names. The coal miners brought in to excavate beneath the superheated nuclear core flout the radiation levels by working in the nude. A tall column of black smoke pours from the reactor for days after the explosion, rather than the small clouds of white vapor that escaped in real life. ## Editors’ Picks [![](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2026/02/06/multimedia/06FD-STAFF-SNOWSTORM-chickenadobo-blgh/06FD-STAFF-SNOWSTORM-chickenadobo-blgh-thumbLarge.jpg)What Our Staff Likes to Cook When It’s Freezing Out](https://cooking.nytimes.com/article/snowstorm-recipes) [![](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2026/02/09/multimedia/09re-location-odonnell-05-gqwh/09re-location-odonnell-05-gqwh-thumbLarge.jpg)A Designer Moves Upstairs — and Starts Over](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/09/realestate/greenwich-village-condo-kyle-odonnell.html) [![](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2026/02/14/magazine/14mag-ethicist/14mag-ethicist-thumbLarge.jpg)My Cousin Is About to Become Homeless. How Much Should I Give Up for Him?](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/07/magazine/cousin-homeless-ethics.html) Advertisement [SKIP ADVERTISEMENT](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/03/arts/television/review-chernobyl-hbo.html#after-pp_edpick) The biggest and most artificial contrivance is the creation of a fictional character, a Belarusian scientist played by Emily Watson who takes a suspicious radiation reading in Minsk and magically, preposterously takes over the story. She’s everywhere at the same time, forcing herself onto the investigatory commission, sitting in on meetings with Gorbachev, raiding government archives, interviewing engineers in their hospital beds, single-handedly uncovering the secret history of the faulty reactor. (If Mazin wanted a prominent female character to leaven a story dominated by men, why did he leave out [Maria Protsenko, the architect who designed Pripyat](https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/chernobyl-pripyat-before-disaster) and supervised its evacuation?) In the course of five hours, Mazin name-checks most of the pertinent facts of the story. But his cheap theatrics — including hilarious setups in which Boris Shcherbina (Stellan Skarsgard), the deputy prime minister in charge of energy, asks questions like “How does a nuclear reactor work?” so that Legasov can explain it for us — detract from the real tragedy of the story. So does the constant sense of foreboding reinforced by the buzzing Geiger-like noises on the soundtrack, and the prevalence of stoic-peasant and menacing-strongman Soviet stereotypes. At a time when the documentary mini-series is probably the strongest, most interesting area of television, it’s too bad that Alex Gibney or Amy Berg didn’t get to Chernobyl first. Chernobyl Monday on HBO A version of this article appears in print on May 4, 2019, Section C, Page 3 of the New York edition with the headline: A Disaster Creakily Retold. [Order Reprints](https://nytimes.wrightsmedia.com/) \\| [Today’s Paper](https://www.nytimes.com/section/todayspaper) \\| [Subscribe](https://www.nytimes.com/subscriptions/Multiproduct/lp8HYKU.html?campaignId=48JQY) See more on: [HBO, Inc.](https://www.nytimes.com/topic/company/home-box-office-inc) - Share full article ### Related Coverage [Looking Again at the Chernobyl Disaster April 3, 2019 ![Looking Again at the Chernobyl Disaster](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2019/04/07/books/review/07Crease2/07Crease2-thumbLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale)](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/03/books/review/adam-higginbotham-midnight-in-chernobyl.html?action=click&module=RelatedCoverage&pgtype=Article&region=Footer) [video Remembering Chernobyl April 26, 2016 ![Remembering Chernobyl](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2016/04/27/science/27Chernobyl-Memorial/27Chernobyl-Memorial-thumbLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale)](https://www.nytimes.com/video/world/europe/100000004361442/remembering-chernobyl.html?action=click&module=RelatedCoverage&pgtype=Article&region=Footer) [Chernobyl Nuclear Accident (1986) March 23, 2011](https://www.nytimes.com/topic/subject/chernobyl-nuclear-accident-1986?action=click&module=RelatedCoverage&pgtype=Article&region=Footer) * ## Explore More in TV and Movies ### Not sure what to watch next? We can help. * - From Minor Muppet to TV’s Top Hog: Miss Piggy began as a bit player, but a sassy attitude and a karate chop carried her to the pinnacle of pop culture. [A new Muppets special premieres](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/04/arts/television/miss-piggy-muppet-show.html). - Jewish Comedy: Is the golden era of Jewish comedy coming to an end? Not so fast. A new special from Raanan Hershberg shows how [charged times can make for funnier jokes](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/03/arts/television/jewish-comedy.html) involving anxiety over Israel, Gaza and antisemitism. - Harry Melling: The actor shed his image as Harry Potter’s cruel cousin, Dudley Dursley — and his clothes — to [star in the queer romance “Pillion.”](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/04/movies/harry-melling-pillion.html) - Stellan Skarsgard: After a stroke four years ago, the actor has [changed how he approaches performances](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/04/movies/stellan-skarsgard-sentimental-value.html), including one he’s become an awards favorite for, the Norwegian family drama “Sentimental Value.” - ‘ The Backbone of ‘Bridgerton’ Is Dance: “There’s so much in the pomp and circumstance and the rules of the world that [comes through dance](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/04/arts/dance/bridgerton-waltz.html),” said Tom Verica, a director of the Netflix series. - Streaming Guides: If you are overwhelmed by the endless options, don’t despair — we put together the [best offerings](https://www.nytimes.com/article/best-movies-netflix.html) [on Netflix](https://www.nytimes.com/article/best-tv-shows-netflix.html), [Max](https://www.nytimes.com/article/best-movies-hbo-max.html), [Disney+](https://www.nytimes.com/article/best-tv-shows-movies-disney-plus.html), [Amazon Prime](https://www.nytimes.com/article/best-movies-amazon-prime.html) and [Hulu](https://www.nytimes.com/article/best-movies-shows-hulu.html) to make choosing your next binge a little easier. ## Related Content ### [More in Television](https://www.nytimes.com/section/arts/television) - [The Super Bowl Ads, Ranked](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/06/arts/television/super-bowl-ads-ranked-2026.html) ![George Clooney pitches Grubhub in one of two Super Bowl ads directed by Yorgos Lanthimos.](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2026/02/10/arts/06cul-superbowlads/06cul-superbowlads-square640-v2.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale) - [Catherine O’Hara Died From Pulmonary Embolism, Death Certificate Says](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/09/movies/catherine-ohara-cause-of-death.html) ![The actress Catherine O’Hara in 2024. She died on Jan. 30 at 71.](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2026/02/09/multimedia/09cul-ohara-death-cause-wtlz/09cul-ohara-death-cause-wtlz-square640.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale) Mark Blinch/Reuters - [Jon Stewart Defends Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl Halftime Show](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/10/arts/television/late-night-bad-bunny.html) ![“I love that he thinks Bad Bunny is the one guy in the world that’s fluent in Spanish,” Jon Stewart said of President Trump.](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2026/02/10/arts/10latenight/10latenight-square640-v2.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale) Comedy Central - [The Best Movies and TV Shows Coming to Netflix in February](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/03/arts/television/netflix-new-february.html) ![From left, Caoilfhionn Dunne, Roisin Gallagher and Sinead Keenan in a scene from “How to Get to Heaven From Belfast.”](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2026/02/03/arts/03cul-netflix-new/03cul-netflix-new-square640-v2.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale) Christopher Barr/Netflix ### Editors’ Picks - [16 Easy Desserts for People Who Really, Really Love Chocolate](https://cooking.nytimes.com/article/easy-chocolate-dessert-recipes-valentines-day) ![Samantha Seneviratne’s turtle bars.](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2026/02/06/multimedia/06FD-EASY-CHOCOLATE-DESSERTS-Turtle-bars-1-pgjb/06FD-EASY-CHOCOLATE-DESSERTS-Turtle-bars-1-pgjb-square640.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale) Kelly Marshall for The New York Times. 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Readable Markdown	Advertisement [SKIP ADVERTISEMENT](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/03/arts/television/review-chernobyl-hbo.html#after-top) ![](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2019/05/03/arts/03chernobyl/merlin_154186002_b59e03bb-57a5-4182-905d-80d655d35b5b-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale) The five-part mini-series “Chernobyl” takes the story of the real-life disaster and turns it into a creaky and conventional disaster movie.Credit...HBO - May 3, 2019 How do you dramatize a great big mess? The 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster is a subject full of gripping detail and historical and scientific import. But as a story, it’s hard to get your arms around — sprawling and repetitious, dependent on arcane particulars of physics and engineering, marked by failures to act and by large-scale action that accomplishes nothing. “Chernobyl,” a five-part mini-series [starting Monday on HBO](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9APLXM9Ei8) (in coproduction with the British network Sky), takes what you could call a Soviet approach to telling the tale. This is incongruous, since one of the messages of the program is that Soviet approaches don’t work. But there it is: the imposition of a simple narrative on history, the twisting of events to create one-dimensional heroes and villains, the broad-brush symbolism. Of course the techniques of Soviet propaganda bore a lot of similarity to the techniques of Hollywood. And in “Chernobyl,” the writer Craig Mazin (“The Hangover” Parts II and III) and the director Johan Renck take an event unlike any other in human history and turn it into a creaky and conventional, if longer than usual, disaster movie. Mazin, who created the series, begins (after a short prologue) in the moments after the explosion that destroyed the newest of the four reactors at the Chernobyl power station, in what is now Ukraine. It’s a disorienting, compelling sequence — like the operators of the plant, we don’t know what has just happened, and we helplessly follow along as they blunder through the flaming wreckage on fruitless tasks, absorbing tremendous doses of radiation that will kill them within weeks. From there, the show moves along in extended vignettes, hitting the familiar high points of the Chernobyl story. A government commission is formed, the company town of Pripyat is evacuated, and firefighters and engineers die horrible deaths in the radiation wards of Moscow’s Hospital No. 6. Soldiers and workers conscripted from all over the Soviet Union undertake a series of deadly projects that have attained mythical status: the relief-valve mission, the digging of the heat-exchange chamber, the clearing of the roof of Unit 3. Mazin ends with a potentially clever device: using testimony at the [show trial of the plant’s supervisors](https://www.nytimes.com/1987/07/30/world/chernobyl-officials-are-sentenced-to-labor-camp.html) as a way to circle back and finally recount the story’s beginning, the botched safety test that led to the explosion. But the scene doesn’t have the force it should, because like much of what has come before, it takes fictional license over the line into contrivance and melodrama. Looking for a tragic hero to center the story on, Mazin has chosen the nuclear physicist Valery Legasov (Jared Harris), in part, perhaps, because his experience with Chernobyl drove him to suicide. Centrally involved in the response to the disaster, Legasov was mostly a good apparatchik, hewing to the party line that operator error and not flaws in Soviet reactor design led to the explosion. Legasov recanted before his death, in interviews made possible by the rapid progress of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika. In “Chernobyl,” however, Mazin puts Legasov on the witness stand at the trial and, in a stroke of pure fantasy, has him boldly denounce Soviet corner-cutting and secrecy, after which he’s hauled into a back room by the K.G.B. The transformation of Legasov into a daring whistle-blower and martyr, complete with a courtroom apotheosis out of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” is just one instance of the show’s propensity toward Hollywood inflation — to show us things that didn’t happen. The workers who volunteer to enter the reactor building to open water valves do so in “Spartacus” style, solemnly standing and reciting their names. The coal miners brought in to excavate beneath the superheated nuclear core flout the radiation levels by working in the nude. A tall column of black smoke pours from the reactor for days after the explosion, rather than the small clouds of white vapor that escaped in real life. The biggest and most artificial contrivance is the creation of a fictional character, a Belarusian scientist played by Emily Watson who takes a suspicious radiation reading in Minsk and magically, preposterously takes over the story. She’s everywhere at the same time, forcing herself onto the investigatory commission, sitting in on meetings with Gorbachev, raiding government archives, interviewing engineers in their hospital beds, single-handedly uncovering the secret history of the faulty reactor. (If Mazin wanted a prominent female character to leaven a story dominated by men, why did he leave out [Maria Protsenko, the architect who designed Pripyat](https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/chernobyl-pripyat-before-disaster) and supervised its evacuation?) In the course of five hours, Mazin name-checks most of the pertinent facts of the story. But his cheap theatrics — including hilarious setups in which Boris Shcherbina (Stellan Skarsgard), the deputy prime minister in charge of energy, asks questions like “How does a nuclear reactor work?” so that Legasov can explain it for us — detract from the real tragedy of the story. So does the constant sense of foreboding reinforced by the buzzing Geiger-like noises on the soundtrack, and the prevalence of stoic-peasant and menacing-strongman Soviet stereotypes. At a time when the documentary mini-series is probably the strongest, most interesting area of television, it’s too bad that Alex Gibney or Amy Berg didn’t get to Chernobyl first. Chernobyl Monday on HBO A version of this article appears in print on May 4, 2019, Section C, Page 3 of the New York edition with the headline: A Disaster Creakily Retold. [Order Reprints](https://nytimes.wrightsmedia.com/) \\| [Today’s Paper](https://www.nytimes.com/section/todayspaper) \\| [Subscribe](https://www.nytimes.com/subscriptions/Multiproduct/lp8HYKU.html?campaignId=48JQY) ## Related Content [More in Television](https://www.nytimes.com/section/arts/television) - ![George Clooney pitches Grubhub in one of two Super Bowl ads directed by Yorgos Lanthimos.](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2026/02/10/arts/06cul-superbowlads/06cul-superbowlads-square640-v2.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale) - ![The actress Catherine O’Hara in 2024. She died on Jan. 30 at 71.](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2026/02/09/multimedia/09cul-ohara-death-cause-wtlz/09cul-ohara-death-cause-wtlz-square640.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale) Mark Blinch/Reuters - ![“I love that he thinks Bad Bunny is the one guy in the world that’s fluent in Spanish,” Jon Stewart said of President Trump.](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2026/02/10/arts/10latenight/10latenight-square640-v2.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale) Comedy Central - ![From left, Caoilfhionn Dunne, Roisin Gallagher and Sinead Keenan in a scene from “How to Get to Heaven From Belfast.”](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2026/02/03/arts/03cul-netflix-new/03cul-netflix-new-square640-v2.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale) Christopher Barr/Netflix Editors’ Picks - ![Samantha Seneviratne’s turtle bars.](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2026/02/06/multimedia/06FD-EASY-CHOCOLATE-DESSERTS-Turtle-bars-1-pgjb/06FD-EASY-CHOCOLATE-DESSERTS-Turtle-bars-1-pgjb-square640.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale) Kelly Marshall for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Samantha Seneviratne. Prop Stylist: Paige Hicks. - ![](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2026/02/09/multimedia/09askvanessa-kclv/09askvanessa-kclv-square640.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale) Laurel Golio for The New York Times Trending in The Times - ![](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2026/02/09/smarter-living/wirecutter/THUMB_260123_WC_WILI_DISHDETERGENT_WL_V6/THUMB_260123_WC_WILI_DISHDETERGENT_WL_V6-square640.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale&width=350) - ![](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2026/02/09/opinion/09marijuana-editorial-image/09marijuana-editorial-image-square640.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale&width=350) Illustration by Rebecca Chew/The New York Times - ![Mark Fischbach, known as Markiplier, directed and funded “Iron Lung” himself.](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2026/02/10/multimedia/09cul-youtube-movie-2-vbcj/09cul-youtube-movie-2-vbcj-square640.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale&width=350) Natasha Campos/Getty Images For Mark Markiplier - ![Breezy Johnson of the United States posing with her gold medal for downhill skiing at the medal ceremony on Sunday.](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2026/02/09/multimedia/09xp-medals1-zcvg/09xp-medals1-zcvg-square640.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale&width=350) Image by James Hill for The New York Times - ![](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2026/02/15/magazine/15mag-LOR-image1/15mag-LOR-image1-square640-v2.png?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale&width=350) Illustration by Christa Jarrold - ![](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2026/02/09/arts/09lipman-still/09lipman-still-square640.png?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale&width=350) Image by Alexandre Louvenaz - ![An instance of interspecific allopreening, as ornithologists call it, between a crested caracara, right, and a black vulture in San Antonio.](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2026/02/09/multimedia/09HS-tb-bird-friends-01-jtcp/09HS-tb-bird-friends-01-jtcp-square640.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale&width=350) Lora Reynolds - ![](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2026/02/09/sports/football/08vid-athletic-superbowl-highlights/08vid-athletic-superbowl-highlights-square640.png?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale&width=350) - ![](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2026/01/29/multimedia/00int-malaysia-durian-promo/00int-malaysia-durian-01-wmzp-square640-v2.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale&width=350) Lauren DeCicca for The New York Times - ![](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2026/02/09/books/review/00TBR-Quiz-LoveQuotes/00TBR-LoveQuotes-square640.png?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale&width=350) Ben Hickey Advertisement [SKIP ADVERTISEMENT](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/03/arts/television/review-chernobyl-hbo.html#after-bottom)
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