For decades HBO has been known to be a productionsmithy for successfully series and hits and just recently they released a new mini series which is really something special.
This and the next articles about Chernobyl will contain spoilers. You are hereby warned.
It's April 26, 1986, when reactor 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant near the Ukrainian city of Pripyat is hit by a reactor disaster. It is a crisis that can have serious consequences and cause millions of deaths in Europe.
But how did this happen? Particularly in the Soviet Union, people are anxious to quickly find the guilty parties and not to be naked on the international banquet. So the scientist Valery Legasov and the minister of energy and oil Borys Shcherbyna are sent to the scene of the accident.
But the sight they face is far worse than expected and the sacrifices that have to be made are more cruel than one can imagine...
The mini-series Chernobyl has five episodes between 56 and 68 minutes long and an age rating of 12/13 years and is a new drama-series from HBO with historical background.
It's a series that manages to create a backdrop and a scene that seems so incredibly close, a camera work that is often very gloomy and captures the dystopian images, a closeness that seems frightening, a score that lets death float all the time over the events, where you know what's going on, but you want to watch it because that doesn't matter. The series is incredibly thrilling.
It's not for nothing that this series is rated on IMDb with 9.6 or 9.7 out of 10 possible Stars and is currently considered the best series in the world, even if it just came out of nowhere. But I can fully understand that once you start the series, you can't stop. One is not only curious what will happen, often one even already knows it, one fibers with it, one wants to see how people want to avert the catastrophe. It's almost a history lesson in a way that's just brilliant.
But let's first talk a little about the cast. Jared Harris as Valery Legasov is a scientist who is drawn into an event and he extremely well reflects how much his professional and scientific responsibility is to find out what happened. How such an explosion can happen in a reactor that can't actually explode.
What is behind it? His personal passion is called for, but at the same time he is woven into a political system in which one opposes, if one rebels against something, perhaps the truth, he risks everything. And that's why this ambivalence of his figure, who doesn't really know what he can do, what he has to do, but he do, his best, is extremely important and he wears it really well.
Part 2 
