Chernobyl
- Thread starter shagcarpetjesus
- Start date
Great Twitter thread on the accuracy of the series from a Soviet culture perspective:
Good find. Kind hits on my perspective that this is really a cultural/political/social drama.
This is one of the bleakest, most engaging shows I've ever seen. I binge watched all 4 episodes and couldnt get enough of it.
Interesting that Chernobyl is now the highest rated show in IMDB history, 9.6 rating.
Interesting that Chernobyl is now the highest rated show in IMDB history, 9.6 rating.
By brutal do you mean intense, riveting and can't stop watching it. Wish it wasn't a once a week show.
I don't have HBO so I won't be able to watch the series. Are there any good podcasts about the incident? I know some of the basics about it but would like to learn more about what happened.
Yeah, brutal in that it's great, but it hits awfully hard.
It is oddly comforting for me to see engineers fail at things, though.
Yeah, Peter Sagal from NPR is doing one.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-chernobyl-podcast/id1459712981
I’ve enjoyed the show so much that I went and looked up Craig Mazin’s (writer, creator of the series) IMDb page to see what else he has done figuring he’s probably got something else interesting in his catalog. He was the writer of Scary Movie 3 and 4, The Hangover parts 2 and 3, and Identity Thief. This might now be my favorite thing about this series.
Mazin was also freshman roommates with Ted Cruz at Princeton and had this lovely character reference for the Senator.
“Ted knows that the one who has despised him the longest is me,” says Mazin, who was majoring in pre-med as Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev glimmered on the nightly news while his country disintegrated. “It took me minutes to loathe him. He is the most inauthentic, pointlessly ambitious person I’ve ever met. A total disregard for the truth.”
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.la...-chernobyl-20190503-story.html?outputType=amp
Mazin was also freshman roommates with Ted Cruz at Princeton and had this lovely character reference for the Senator.
“Ted knows that the one who has despised him the longest is me,” says Mazin, who was majoring in pre-med as Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev glimmered on the nightly news while his country disintegrated. “It took me minutes to loathe him. He is the most inauthentic, pointlessly ambitious person I’ve ever met. A total disregard for the truth.”
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.la...-chernobyl-20190503-story.html?outputType=amp
Just finished the series finale and I must say it was quite good and satisfying. If I were to describe the show in one word I’d say ‘steady’, as in a steady high level of acting, revelations about the disaster and story pacing.
I like how at the end of the film the director showed real footage of the people in the show. Some of the resemblances were dead on.
Glad I watched it. HBO is king of TV.
I like how at the end of the film the director showed real footage of the people in the show. Some of the resemblances were dead on.
Glad I watched it. HBO is king of TV.
I was amazed how the show was able to convey the basics of nuclear fission in a way that made sense enough that I feel like I could explain it to someone else. The courtroom scene with the red and blue checks and balances in the fission process was highly educational. I loved the mini-series, the entire thing was gut wrenching from start to finish.
One of the best limited series I've ever seen. That second to last episodes with the animals left me gutted after all the previous horrible stuff with the humans obviously.
Yeah my girlfriend was in tears and I had to mute the TV until it was over. "They are pets, so they'll come to you" oofta.
The last episode was amazing. They did such a great job tying up all the plot lines. Even the explanation of the female scientist being "fake" but an aggregated representation of all the scientists who fought the "system" to make their concerns known.
I thought that was amazing. Very well thought out idea and extremely well done.
I also go back to the first episode when they showed Valery's suicide, which they discussed after the show was a way to avoid feeling like they built up to it. I do think it would have felt like a sudden, late throw in if they had waited to the last episode to show that scene. Absolutely brutal miniseries, extremely well done.
I think it was on the Chernobyl podcast but one of the discussions stuck with me. I'm paraphrasing, but Mazin said the only country that could have caused this incident was the Soviet Union. But the only country that could mobilize 3/4 of a million people, send in "suicide squads", and clean everything up was the Soviet Union.
The amount of sacrifice, the "OK, let's just do this and get it over with" mentality was as fascinating to me as the incompetence of Dyatlov and the rest of the idiots.
The amount of sacrifice, the "OK, let's just do this and get it over with" mentality was as fascinating to me as the incompetence of Dyatlov and the rest of the idiots.
I thought about this quite a bit during the entire mini-series: If the same thing happened in the US, would the people be as selfless and willing to sacrifice themselves for the greater good? I really don’t know the answer. The russians have never been afraid of throwing bodies at a problem though.
Easy answer, NO we would not, but we also have the technology so that our leaders would never have to ask that of our citizens or soldiers.
Overall a great show, it striking that the Soviets were that far behind the West, and we still feared them. Living through the era, that is one of the things we always thought about, and it was all a lie. No containment around the nuclear reactor, using different metals in the tips of the control rods, all to save money. Then when the accident happened, everyone said it was under control and no need to worry. Its like today, people want to believe the lies more than face the truth. People wonder why we need government regulation, this shows what can happen when corporations are allowed to do as they please without safety concerns. The only difference was in the Soviet Union, it was the government calling the shots not a large multinational corporation that has bought off federal employees and elected officals with campaign donations.
