Chernobyl

2019

Craig Mazin wrote this five part miniseries and Johan Renck directed all of it, covering the 1986 reactor explosion in Soviet Ukraine and the months of containment that followed. It is built around what people knew, when they knew it, and what it cost anyone to say so out loud. Jared Harris plays the physicist Valery Legasov, with Stellan Skarsgard as the party official assigned to him, Emily Watson as a composite scientist, and Jessie Buckley as a firefighter's wife in Pripyat. It aired on HBO in 2019 and made a procedural out of institutional denial.