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While the end of April marked the 33rd anniversary of the man-made disaster at Ukraine's Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, the larger story behind the incident resonates even today-and that's the driving force behind HBO's new miniseries, Chernobyl.
The series aims to bring the true story of that disaster to people's living rooms everywhere, and Craig Mazin, the creator and showrunner of HBO's five-part miniseries, wants to be clear that there's a specific reason why this story resonates today. "It couldn't be a better time-and that's not just me saying marketing crap," he says. "Because honestly, if it weren't, I would just be like, Oh yeah, it doesn't really matter right now. People should watch this at any time."
The show makes it clear that nuclear power alone did not cause the disaster-it was Chernobyl's uniquely bad management of that nuclear power. The show's conflict comes from the Soviet government having to reckon with the fact that the disaster was preventable; it was a human-based failure in design, planning, and procedure. In fact, Chernobyl ends up more about the Soviets' censorship of the disaster than the disaster itself.
"At the heart of this show, we are asking a question," he said. "What happens when we debase the truth and celebrate lies instead? Or when we play with the truth and make it our toy, or distort it? What happens when we deny that there's truth at all?"
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In interviews with Men's Health, Mazin and lead actor Jared Harris likened the Soviet government's willful ignorance about Chernobyl to the way some U.S. officials today discount the conclusions of climate science.
"The takeaway from Chernobyl is that lies, and the contempt for even the idea that there's a truth, comes with a terrible cost," Mazin said. "And sooner or later, we pay that cost."
Harris's character, Valery Legasov, along with Stellan Skarsgrd's Boris Shcherbina, serve as the de facto heroes of the story-and yet they're barely present in the series' first episode. Instead, the stage is set by smaller players to show just what a bureaucratic mess is being set up.
Donald Sumpter (Game of Thrones fans might recognize him as Maester Luwin) is a compelling presence in his single brief scene in Chernobyl, appearing as a Soviet government official named Zharkov. He gives an authoritarian-sounding speech about covering the incident up: "We seal off the city-no one leaves," he says. "And cut the phone lines. Contain the spread of misinformation." And so the attempted suppression begins. "We will all be rewarded for what we do here tonight. This is our moment to shine," he says, igniting an in-room standing ovation.
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Neither Harris' nor Skarsgrd's characters are in the room in that moment.
"If they were lying to you, you didn't have an ability to correct that narrative. You couldn't hold power to account," Harris says of the Soviet government back then."It was a state where lies were being passed as being truthful."
While the nuclear disaster at the show's center has been covered and contained in the 33 years since, the bitter reality is that the driving force of the disaster, and everything that followed-the challenging of objective fact-has been anything but left in the past.
"In the end, the truth is the truth. It doesn't care what we're doing. We can have endless debates about climate change. We can come up with all sorts of interesting charts, and figures, and facts. The climate doesn't care. The wind doesn't care, the rain doesn't care, the ice doesn't care. It will do what it does," Mazin says. "And the same is true for the inside of a very poorly designed, poorly run, nuclear reactor. It will do what it does."