Most critics come away shaken and impressed. Nine of the eleven reviews are positive, and the praise clusters in two places: the central performances from Harris, Skarsgård and Watson, and the decision to show what radiation does to a body without flinching. Several reviews describe the series as horror rather than historical drama, with dread building steadily across the episodes, and most credit it for tracing the Soviet regime’s secrecy and buck-passing as carefully as the accident itself.
The reservations are about tone more than craft. Even admirers call it relentlessly bleak, and a few find the exposition heavy-handed or the whole thing draining by the final hour. Consequence thinks it works better as a fable about lies than as history. The one outright dissent comes from The Guardian, which finds the storytelling confusing and chaotic despite the acting, and argues the series mirrors the disaster’s disorder too literally to grip.