Chernobyl Review

Mazin opens with the ending, which removes suspense as a tool and forces the series to work on dread and procedure instead. That is why it holds. The first hour is the best of it: a control room full of men arguing about a number that cannot be true, staged so the audience understands the physics before any of them will say it out loud. Jakob Ihre shoots the zone in fluorescent green and concrete grey with almost no camera movement, and Hildur Gudnadottir's score, built from recordings made inside a working power plant, conveys invisible danger better than any effect could.

Jared Harris plays Legasov as a man performing calm while doing arithmetic he already knows the answer to. Stellan Skarsgard's party official has the more interesting arc, a bureaucrat who discovers he would rather be useful than safe. The composite scientist and the compressed timelines are the standard docudrama compromises, and the dialogue occasionally states a theme it has already dramatised. Everything else is close to flawless.