Boris Shcherbina (Stellan Skarsgard), left, travels to Pripyat, Ukraine, with the U.S.S.R.’s leading nuclear physicist, Valery Legasov (Jared Harris), in “Chernobyl.” (Liam Daniel/HBO)TV criticHBO’s fascinating and necessarily bleak miniseries “Chernobyl” is every bit as grim as it looks — maybe even grimmer than that. Chernobyl’s human toll is still unknown — this effective, no-nonsense and highly researched dramatization estimates deaths anywhere from 4,000 to 93,000 over the past 33 years. (An official count, left over from Soviet authority, is still just 31 dead.) (Liam Daniel/HBO)Much of “Chernobyl” is preoccupied with the quiet traces of heroism and dignity that faced down the corruption and dishonesty that defined Soviet life. The disaster, it turns out, was attributable to human errors, stemming from an unnecessary stress test ordered by the reactor’s bureaucrats.

Source: Washington Post May 05, 2019 18:08 UTC