One of the very best miniseries on HBO can be watched in just six hours, and it’s so good that you’ll want to watch it all in one sitting. HBO has long been a juggernaut of prestige television. Many of the best TV shows ever made were HBO originals, from The Sopranos to The Wire to Deadwood, and many of this decade’s biggest hits also came from HBO. Suffice to say, being an HBO original is essentially a mark of quality at this point.
Given HBO’s prestige, it has made plenty of fantastic miniseries to choose from. From masterpiece science fiction like Station Eleven to timeless war dramas like Band of Brothers, the best HBO miniseries are among the best miniseries in general. In fact, HBO has mastered the art of the limited series to such a degree that finding one to watch can be difficult; there are so many incredible miniseries that it’s hard to choose between them.
All that is to say that calling a show one of HBO’s best miniseries is an incredibly high honor, and few miniseries deserve that designation as much as Chernobyl. As the title indicates, the miniseries is a dramatization of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant meltdown near Pripyat, Ukraine, in 1986. It’s a haunting tale based on a devastating true story, and it’s easily one of the best miniseries HBO has ever produced.
HBO’s Chernobyl Is A Breathtaking True Story, But It’s Hard To Binge
It takes just six hours to watch all of Chernobyl‘s five episodes, but it’s incredibly difficult to watch all at once. As previously mentioned, Chernobyl is based on the real-life nuclear meltdown at the power plant of the same name. Dozens of workers died in the immediate disaster, and tens of thousands of people died from radiation in the decades following it. Chernobyl is based on a true tragedy, which can be emotionally intense to get through.
The way Chernobyl handles depicting that tragedy also makes it difficult to watch in one sitting. Chernobyl is, simply put, a very intense miniseries. The disaster itself is nothing short of horrifying, the show’s depiction of radiation sickness is haunting, and it also does a tremendous job of conveying the immense stress and anxiety surrounding the situation. Add to that the fact that Chernobyl takes great strides to be as accurate as possible and delve into very technical and detailed aspects of nuclear physics, and it can be quite difficult to watch.
Though it is difficult to binge, Chernobyl may just make you want to. It’s a masterpiece, through and through. Chernobyl won the majority of awards it was nominated for, including several Emmys and Golden Globes. It also does a great job of making something most people only know about secondhand or from history books into a deeply personal and tragic affair. Chernobyl is a tragedy, a mystery procedural, a political thriller, and more all wrapped into one, and it handles every aspect of its true story with the utmost care and grace. It’s a masterpiece, and the best way to prove that is simply by watching it.
Chernobyl Is Actually Better When You Binge It
As hard as it can be to binge-watch Chernobyl, it’s actually one of the few miniseries that benefits from being watched all in one sitting. Again, Chernobyl deals with an almost unfathomable tragedy that happened to millions of real people, but it’s worth going through the intense emotions those events evoke to experience the story the way it really happened. Watching Chernobyl in binge format gives viewers an idea of the urgency and catastrophe of the actual meltdown.
So much of Chernobyl‘s true story is built around a race against time. Between trying to contain the massive and fatal levels of radiation to just trying to figure out what actually happened, this real event was a crisis in every sense of the word. While it did take place over the course of weeks and months, watching Chernobyl all at once gives viewers an inkling of how dire the situation was and how much pressure and stress the characters — and the world at large — were under.
As an added bonus, watching Chernobyl in one sitting makes its more shocking revelations hit even harder. Seeing the coverups, the blunders, and the general mishandling of the situation right after watching the horrors inflicted upon countless innocent people sparks an intense rage. Watching that all happen over the course of several days softens the blow and takes away a lot of Chernobyl‘s bite, which is easily one of the best things about the miniseries. Chernobyl is perfectly paced to be watched in one sitting, and it’s arguably the best way to experience it.
- Release Date
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2019 – 2019
- Network
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HBO
- Showrunner
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Craig Mazin
