This is a really weird post. The thrust appears to be a contrarian desire to portray the Soviet government as capable and competent, and I wonder if it's the author's naivete or some sort of an agenda. The post latches on small discrepancies, but somehow ignores the entire impetus of Legasov's tapes. He sure didn't record them to praise the government:

"And when I visited the Chernobyl station after the accident and saw what was happening there, I myself drew a precise and unequivocal conclusion, that the Chernobyl disaster is an apotheosis, the pinnacle of all the mismanagement that has been carried out for decades in our country."

The show is obviously a "based on a true story" dramatization that invented personas, added tension where little existed, and so forth. But the overall thesis checks out: it was a massive failure of governance before the disaster and during it, including the well-documented fact that the Soviets were initially withholding information from the rest of the world and turning down aid.

It's funny that this series seems as if it is being confused as a documentary. It was a dramatic telling of a story. Creative licensing was in full effect. The first item in the "Series VS tapes: point by point" is a very common use of that creative licensing. Trying to follow multiple people in a work like this gets tiring and a bit boring. The details are kept, but it's easier to follow when those multiple people are written as one character. It's why the term "littleuns" was used in Lord of The Flies as the individuals were not important to the story, just the fact they were there and needed to be considered allowed the story to not get bogged down.

The series was also told completely in ~8 hours of content, yet this event clearly took longer than 8 hours to play out. Why no critique on that?

> Legasov commended the swiftness and efficiency of the government response at all levels

Sure, but in those times, he would be compelled to say such things. That doesn't mean he believed it.

It seems the main faults that OP finds in the show are that Legasov had issues with his government, when in "reality" he thought they were great. But is that "reality," or oppression?

I also don't see the fault in highlighting him as the "main" scientist; it's a show.

M. Gessen wrote a much better piece about the accuracy of HBO's Chernobyl:

https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/what-hbos-cher...

This piece seems a little confused, since Legasov wasn't the primary source for the show?

It was a good show. I've re-watched it a couple of times. The actors are excellent, and it's well-done.

I take it for granted that a lot of it was amped up for drama, but other sources (several documentaries) seem to agree on a lot of the actions and timelines. The show added motivations, and some fictional characters.

I also enjoyed Dopesick, and that's a subject that I have direct experience and knowledge of. I have pretty much the same issues with that show.

But I still enjoyed both of them as dramas.

If I want facts, I'll do my own research.

To be honest, I find most of these inconsistencies to be inconsequential for enjoying the film. The ones that really get to me though are the dramatic overestimates on the devastation caused by Chernobyl, and the effects of the radiation itself. Most of the effect of the film comes from this belief that the radiation really is that dangerous. When you know it isn't, it takes quite a bit away from the premise.

Hey Omar! I met you briefly in Grenoble many years ago. I hope you're doing well.

I only recently watched this series and found it very entertaining. But I never expected it to be very accurate. It's definitely been dramatized for TV. I definitely didn't get an anti-nuclear sentiment from the show, I mostly think they were trying to portray a negative view of Soviet Bureaucracy.

>It was about Anatoly Grishchenko, a Soviet helicopter pilot who had served in Chernobyl and, like many others, had developed cancer as a result.

If there's one thing that pissed me off about the TV series, it was its poor to non-existent storytelling surrounding the helicopter crews who ran sortie after sortie right over the burning reactor—around the clock—knowing full well the grave risks posed by the radiation.

Instead, we were shown one disjointed helicopter crash scene amidst a still-burning reactor that made them look like bumbling fools attempting something futile.

In real life, the Chernobyl incident happened on 26 April, 1986. The Mi-8 crash where it struck the crane didn't happen until October 2nd, 1986.

Aviation was instrumental in containing the disaster during its early phases. Those crews helped save an untold number of lives. Their portrayal or lack thereof in the show was massively disrespectful to their contributions.

---

Between 27 April and 1 May, about 1800 helicopter flights deposit over 5,000 metric tons of sand, lead, clay, and neutron absorbing boron onto the burning reactor. It is now known that virtually none of the neutron absorbers reached the core. [0]

[0] https://www.chernobylgallery.com/chernobyl-disaster/timeline...

The bit about "The water tanks in the reactor were full, and the uranium fuel rods were at risk of melting through the water tanks, potentially releasing a force equivalent to a multi-megaton nuclear device and devastating much of Europe with radiation." is sort of complex to judge.

It is absolutely true that that scenario was impossible and couldn't actually happen. But as far as we can tell (documented in Voices of Chernobyl) someone at a similar meeting to the one portrayed in the TV show did really say that that could happen as portrayed in the TV show. But of course the audience is going to assume that things scientists say in shows like this are accurate.

Dyatlov's interview from the 90s, which is still available on youtube [1], seems to fit better with the account given in the hit book "Midnight in Chernobyl" (which was the basis for the series,) than the story written for TV. To me the series just seemed like a rehash of the same movie tropes we've seen time and time again in dramatizations of the accident, compared to a true adaptation of book, which included a lot of updated analysis beyond the IAEA original report.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8__v9EswN4