There are events that it is impossible to forget, because they have indelibly marked not only the lives of many people, but often also the history of a city, a nation or even an entire continent, and one of these is certainly the disaster of Chernobyl took place on April 26, 1986 in today's Ukraine (which at the time was still part of the USSR). Despite its importance, the most massive nuclear disaster ever it is still a fact that is very little talked about, it is in fact mentioned in various video games or in some films, but never before had a TV series been dedicated to him in which he was the protagonist and in which events were told - still not much clear - thirty years ago now. There HBO, producer of TV series such as Westworld e The Throne of Swords, once again she has shown herself to be visionary and far-sighted, giving life to this five-episode miniseries that tells for the first time what happened then and which, released on May 6 in America and the United Kingdom, had an unexpected success by positioning itself on IMDb like the series with the highest grade in history (outperforming competitors like Breaking Bad, Sherlock and Game of Thrones itself).
A truth that hurts
The first episode, which opens with a short prologue set a few years after the accident, immediately gets to the heart, showing us the exact moment of the explosion and above all the reactions of anyone who would soon have entered the story, remaining involved in the story: from the superintendent of the plant, to the firefighters who rushed to put out the flames, to the doctors of the nearby hospital, to the simple civilians who lived in the surroundings.
The choice of the screenwriter Craig Mazin is to spare us nothing, showing without filters the naive carelessness of the population as opposed to the blind desire to reduce the government incident, the terror in the eyes of the employees, the ephemeral and deadly joy of children in playing with the ashes of the reactor like snow and adults looking at the strangely colored flames of nuclear fire.
The production of this series, which filming took place in Lithuania between a city extremely similar to Pryp'yat 'and a nuclear power plant not very different from Chernobyl, has involved an important cast, with actors of the caliber of Jared Harris (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Lincoln, The Crown), Paul Ritter (Harry Potter, Dirk Gently, Inferno), Stellan Skarsgard (Will Hunting, Thor, Pirates of the Caribbean) ed Emily Watson (Story of a book thief, The Theory of Everything, Anna Karenina). Yet a note of merit also goes to the lesser-known actors, who show themselves perfectly at the level of their more well-known colleagues, giving us engaging interpretations full of pathos, capable of striking deeply.
Basically this series, which we will see starting from 10 June on Sky Atlantic, it's not just something to watch in your spare time for a few hours, it's not just a means to entertain yourself, it's a real tool to understand, through a faithful and realistic script, what happened that night and in the following days and above all to ensure that even those who were not yet born at the time, can through the most popular media channel in this historical period (in fact, the TV series) learn of terrible facts which too often is overlooked negligently.
