Chernobyl

Craig Mazin and Johan Renck's Chernobyl launched on HBO in May 2019 and won ten Primetime Emmys, including Outstanding Limited Series, as well as two Golden Globes. Few pieces of prestige television that decade travelled further or mattered more internationally, and for a while the five-episode miniseries even displaced Breaking Bad as the highest-rated television production on IMDb.

It reconstructs the April 1986 disaster at the V. I. Lenin Nuclear Power Plant outside Pripyat, in the Ukrainian SSR, from the explosion of Reactor 4 through the eighteen months of containment, evacuation, investigation and tribunal that followed. Jared Harris plays the nuclear physicist Valery Legasov, who led the technical investigation; Stellan Skarsgård is Boris Shcherbina, the Soviet vice-chairman who oversaw the response; Emily Watson plays Ulana Khomyuk, a composite scientist; Paul Ritter is the deputy chief engineer Anatoly Dyatlov. Hildur Guðnadóttir built her electronic, industrial score partly from sound recordings made inside a real power plant.

Its attention to procedural and historical accuracy carried it well beyond television. Tourism to the exclusion zone surged, several Soviet-era documents were re-translated and republished, and the show's central idea, that the cost of lies eventually has to be paid, entered political argument in a year when authoritarian disinformation was a live public concern. Mazin's screenplay is among the most carefully researched pieces of recent television drama.

Why it's an Editor's Pick: In this series the research is the drama. Renck films the exclusion zone in a palette of concrete and iodine, Hildur Guðnadóttir built the score from recordings made inside a power plant, and the ensemble plays scientists and miners as working people, with no heroics laid on. It swept the Emmys and widened what a limited series could take as its subject.