Chernobyl

Craig Mazin and Johan Renck's Chernobyl launched on HBO in May 2019 and won ten Primetime Emmys including Outstanding Limited Series, alongside two Golden Globes. The five-episode miniseries became one of the most internationally consequential pieces of prestige-streaming television of its decade, with its IMDb rating briefly displacing Breaking Bad as the highest-rated television production on the platform.

The series reconstructs the April 1986 disaster at the V. I. Lenin Nuclear Power Plant outside Pripyat, 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 plays Boris Shcherbina, the Soviet vice-chairman who oversaw the response; Emily Watson plays the composite scientist Ulana Khomyuk; Paul Ritter plays the deputy chief engineer Anatoly Dyatlov. Hildur Guðnadóttir's Icelandic-built electronic-industrial score was constructed partly from sound recordings made inside an actual power plant.

The series's commitment to procedural-historical accuracy made it culturally consequential well beyond television: tourism to the actual exclusion zone surged, several Soviet-era documents were re-translated and republished, and the show's central thesis — that the cost of lies eventually has to be paid — entered political discourse during a year when authoritarian disinformation was a continuing public concern. Mazin's screenplay is one of the most carefully researched pieces of recent prestige drama.