Craig Mazin and Johan Renck’s five-part account of the 1986 reactor explosion is exact, frightening and hard to look away from. It explains itself once too often at the end, but Harris and Skarsgård carry it.
Craig Mazin’s five-part series opens in a Moscow flat on 26 April 1988, two years to the day after the explosion, with Valery Legasov (Jared Harris) speaking into a cassette recorder. Then it goes back to the night itself and stays there for most of an hour. The plan is simple: show what happened, in order, and show who knew and when. We recommend it warmly, with one condition. Know how much of it you are going to have to look at.
The first hour is the best. In the control room of reactor four, deputy chief engineer Anatoly Dyatlov (Paul Ritter) has just heard the building come apart and decides that it has not. He tells Alexandr Akimov (Sam Troughton) and Leonid Toptunov (Robert Emms) that a tank has burst, orders water pumped into a core that no longer exists, and sends men to go and look at it. Ritter plays him as a man whose career depends on the next sentence being true. In a bunker under the plant, the director, Viktor Bryukhanov (Con O’Neill), and chief engineer Nikolai Fomin (Adrian Rawlins) sit through a meeting at which it is agreed to seal off the town and cut its phone lines. We were horrified, and then angry, and the anger lasted longer, because nobody on screen is shouting. They are filling in forms.
Jakob Ihre shoots all of it in the colours of a Soviet corridor: pale green paint, orange sodium lamps, grey daylight. Above the plant he puts a column of blue light that the people of Pripyat gather on a railway bridge to admire, and it is the prettiest thing in the series, which is the point. Luke Hull’s production design gives the control room its walls of dials and the bunker its long table. Hildur Guðnadóttir’s score is barely a score. It is hums, clicks and metal groans that could be coming from the building, and when a dosimeter starts ticking you cannot always tell which is which. Editors Simon Smith and Jinx Godfrey cut that first night between the control room, the bunker, the bridge and the Ignatenkos’ flat, and they never hurry.
Harris and Stellan Skarsgård carry the middle three hours. Harris plays Legasov as a tired, careful man who has already worked out how the story ends and is trying to get the arithmetic in before it does. Skarsgård’s Boris Shcherbina, the party official sent to keep him in line, starts as an obstacle and becomes something else, and Skarsgård does it without one scene of visible conversion. Their first helicopter ride, in which Legasov refuses to let the pilot fly over the open core and Shcherbina threatens to have him thrown out of it, settles the working relationship in about a minute. Emily Watson’s Ulana Khomyuk, a physicist from Minsk who arrives with her own readings, is well played and we could see the joins: she is there to ask the questions the plot needs asked, and she asks them one after another.
Jessie Buckley’s strand is the one that got us. She plays Lyudmilla, the firefighter’s wife, with her back straight and her mouth shut, never once reaching for our sympathy. It worked on us more than any of the speeches.
The flaws are the ones you would guess. Mazin does not know when to stop explaining: Legasov teaches the physics twice, the second time with red and blue placards, and it feels like a school assembly. There are a great many men in identical grey suits, Odile Dicks-Mireaux has dressed them that way deliberately, and it takes two episodes to tell the liars from the merely frightened. Everyone speaks English in their own accent, which we liked; it spares us a room of British actors doing Russian voices.
The tagline asks what the cost of lies is, and the series answers in bodies, which is not subtle. It does not need to be. It is a 15 certificate and a hard one. Watch one episode a night; five in a row is a punishment nobody has earned, and the pause gives the ticking time to stop.
