Critic Reviews

Chernobyl is a series where you will have to remind yourself to unclench your jaw and un-tense your shoulders while watching it. It is heartbreaking and intense, and a hell of a thing to watch the day after Game of Thrones. But it’s also necessary.

Even though it can be a tough watch, I found “Chernobyl” riveting. The sacrifice of those involved is inspiring, making it a mini-series you won’t want to miss.

A powerful testament, and TV's best miniseries since last fall's “Escape at Dannemora.”

Powerful and haunting. ... As bleak as it all sounds, “Chernobyl” is a riveting drama that’s full of payoffs. It’s a thoroughly researched account of an event that’s still misunderstood, and it captures the sacrifices made by the Russian people — knowingly and inadvertently — in their efforts to clean up another state-sponsored mess.

Pleasant viewing it’s not. But in terms of capturing a time and place, the five-part miniseries succeeds on every level. ... HBO’s extraordinary retelling of what went down in Pripyat and the then Soviet Union at large is its own reward for now -- and a certain multiple trophy winner during next year’s awards season.

“Chernobyl” won’t be for everyone. With constant, low-simmering intensity and an all-too-visible air of death, the vivid recreation of an unimaginable disaster can be uncomfortable to say the least. ... But Mazin and Renck do an impressive job of inviting the audience into a story filled with so many horrors.

The series is a vivid and detailed retelling of the cataclysm. It begins as a near-real-time thriller. ... This miniseries doesn’t have too many flourishes, and doesn’t need them. Whenever Vasily explains the statistics involved — the scope of the environmental disaster, the possibility of a meltdown seeping into the water supply — the scares are tangible.

Chernobyl really is a horror movie: not just about errant technology, but also a maleficent portrait of an ideology that denies the existence of error.

The esteemed actors [Stellan Skarsgard and Jared Harris] bring nuanced, complicated baggage to their protagonists, who are navigating a bureaucracy uninterested in failure, and so too does Emily Watson as Ulana Khomyuk, a nuclear authority (and composite character) who aids Harris in his quest to contain the Chernobyl tragedy as well as deduce its underlying cause. Together, the show’s headliners lend the action gravity and humanity . ... Renck and Mazin’s haunting miniseries.

Spare, bleak and devastating.