Yeah, I agree. Chernobyl is the scariest thing I've ever seen and it's not even technically horror.

I never thought of Chernobyl as a horror series but now I'm replaying it in my mind and it totally is.

It's kinda hard to say, but no other show has made me feel the emotions that this show made me feel, on that level.

Idk if "scary" is the best word for it, but I agree with you. It's scary in a very different way than most other "scary" shows.

Yes. That shot of the station just releasing, uncontrollably the radiation in the air is the scariest shit I've seen.

Having lived through the actual events, the tv Series was immensely enjoyable... but had a disappointing failure of potential.

The creator heavily fictionalized it, but worse, he didn't have to.

The same series, but made with a principle of being strictly factual, would have been just as terrifying. Probably even more so, because it would have all been true.

It could then have been not just incredible entertainment, but powerful education too.

Alas, he went for creative license over significance and legitimacy. There's now a couple of generations (and counting) who will have a false record of history because they think it's a documentary. And derivative works that build on those false impressions will end up revising history forever due to the flawed way that citations and argument work.

Check out Chernobyl Diaries

I think that first season of The Terror is better. Chernobyl is a piece of art, everything is just amazing however Terror was more scary.

Not that he asked though...

I've always thought that for the first episode at least it's intentionally shot like a horror movie.

I’m reliving this a bit because I’m in the middle of Adam Higginbotham’s incredible book Midnight in Chernobyl which covers the catastrophe. There are different kinds of fear, but there is a palpable dread throughout this show that is based on a very real fear of the reality of the tragedy. I think the most visceral kind of fear always originates with your empathy for the characters in the story, imagining how you would feel if you were them and what you might do in that situation. The fact that it happened forces that empathy on you without the protective mental and emotional separation you can give yourself in a fictional scenario. That, along with the production choices and the musical accompaniment, convinces me that it’s the scariest show of all time.

How about when their flashlights go out? That was pretty much a horror trope.

I’ve got to disagree with you, I think the potential was maximized by using artistic licenses when it made sense and provided a more impactful narrative. If you want to watch a documentary, watch a documentary. There’s validity to that being a better educational choice. But to make a dramatic television show or movie, there are choices a writer and director have to make in order to make the story flow better and drive home the emotional points that are important to the storyteller. There is a good podcast that accompanied the show where they discuss the differences between the historical facts and the storytelling on the show, and why they made those choices.

At some point, there is personal responsibility for the viewer to seek out the historical record rather than repeating what they saw on a TV show as historical fact and spreading some misinformation.

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The fact that you're downvoted over this comment reminded me of the strange phenomena when this show came out, most viewers were virulently opposed to the idea that it was anything but an accurate representation of history.

I mean, I loved the show but it was a heavy dramatization and that's not even a criticism, just a simple fact.

My friend had to nope out when the divers went into the water. He didn’t like the overwhelming dread he was feeling

> I think the potential was maximized by using artistic licenses

That's the opposite of true. You don't maximize educational potential by lying to young viewers. That's destroying the educational potential.

We already agree, 50 out of 50 on entertainment. But imagine my proposed version, with 50/50 entertainer plus an extra 50/50 on legitimacy.

> when it made sense and provided a more impactful narrative.

It did neither. Lots of it didn't make sense, and by being untruthful, it was less impactful.

There's just lots of people who don't know that. When they learn, people end up being disappointed he lied so much. Some die hard fans use justification, but you can tell they kind of wish he hadn't cheated them either.

> If you want to watch a documentary, watch a documentary.

Why not have something that's doubly good? And in fact the non-fictionalized is better than the one you've been told anyway.

> There’s validity to that being a better educational choice.

> But to make a dramatic television show or movie, there are choices a writer and director have to make

Only if that writer first makes the decision that they're going to abandon integrity and assume the audience is too dumb or lacks discernment.

> in order to make the story flow better and drive home the emotional points

Again, there were no cheats that made the story "flow" better or drove emotion better.

> There is a good podcast that accompanied the show

The podcast was self-indulgent tripe in which he made feeble excuses for disrespecting the viewers and fictionalizing so much.

What's most surprising (but perhaps shouldn't be) is how redditors, who normally reject such inauthenticity and infantilization, just gobbled him up with a spoon. Even today, as you are, they argue that by watering it down it's actually more concentrated, which is course false.

It's telling when fans look at something and refuse to see even a speck of improvement being possible.

> At some point, there is personal responsibility for the viewer to seek out the historical record rather than repeating what they saw on a TV show

Why?

Why make something deliberately flawed and then force viewers to go learn that you've bent the truth?

Imagine if Chernobyl used a principle of being only truthful. No injections of bull. It would have been more powerful because it would gave been true. No need for the handful of the intellectually curious to eventually wander off and find out what was wring with it. Just make it a solid gut punch of strictly true events and explanations. No hyperbole. No fakery. Just brutal, horrifying truth.

The way you're explaining it sounds like adding more ghosts and car chases would have been welcomed.

Some of these things I’m not sure how to respond to, but I’ll try.

I think you are assuming that the purpose of the show was to maximize educational potential, I don’t think that’s true. I think the purpose was to tell a story of a crazy event that happened in an entertaining way that hopefully gets people more interested in the event to learn more about it.

I think you are in a very small minority of people who watched the show who thinks the show didn’t make sense or was not very impactful. It’s one of the most acclaimed shows of all time, universally beloved. I get that appreciation of art is subjective, but you are writing those statements as if they are objective fact.

As I stated in my original comment to the OP (not my original reply to you), I’m reading Midnight in Chernobyl right now, which maybe you have read? As I read through it, there is nothing about the way the book deviates from the story the show told that makes me disappointed in the artistic choices the writers and director took. Certainly not enough for me to continuously refer to them as lies.

I don’t think a straight factual telling of the events would be as good as what we got, so I don’t think it would be doubly as good. You seem to be very aggressive in the attacks against the show creators, continually calling their version lies and saying they abandoned integrity. This is pretty interesting, and I’m definitely curious why you feel so strongly. War movies, biopics, really anything that is dramatic that tells the story of a historical incident does this. Why are you so upset about this particular story?

it was disturbing and dramatic i guess but I don't think it was really scary, personally. But I see where you're coming from. It was a very enjoyable show.

Why not share with us some of the factual changes you'd have made that would have kept it a 50/50 entertainment-wise also? It's hard to agree or disagree with you without hearing anything of your vision, and I'm interested in what changes you'd make given the clear passion you have, but with your outright dismissal of the creatives' due-diligence through the podcast its difficult to see.

I'm not saying you're right or wrong but I tend to feel the changes made for dramatization kept the emotional weight of the issue intact in a way that clinical factual presentation sometimes fails to account for. I'm curious as to how you envision the emotive weight to be fostered outside out the simple weight of the facts, and it would probably help others discuss this as well if there were more direct reference to your intent.

I thought the series was pretty directly based on Svetlana Alexievich's Chernobyl Prayer, which was a collection of interviews with people who had first hand knowledge of the events?

scary not really, but intense? hell yes. Scariest for me still remains Hammer House of Horrors

> you are assuming that the purpose of the show was to maximize educational potential,

You're assuming wrong. But why should a work only have one limited purpose, to the extent that worshippers are violently opposed to it having multiple purposes?

Why do they dictate that the good has to come with bad? Why not good plus good plus good?

> think the purpose was to tell a story of a crazy event that happened

On your definition then, it failed, because it didn't tell the story of "what happened".

> that hopefully gets people more interested in the event to learn more about it.

The better way to do that is not to lie. Tell the truth. Those who decide to dig deeper will be further amazed as they learn that what you've told them is actually true.

> I think you are in a very small minority of people who watched the show who thinks the show didn’t make sense

That's not what I said.

> or was not very impactful.

Ok, that's a second mistruth, and kind of a big lie considering I've said the opposite.

> one of the most acclaimed shows of all time,

That's a common logic fallacy. Popular doesn't mean right. Or true. Or good. It just means popular.

> universally beloved.

Also false.

> that makes me disappointed in the artistic choices

That's common among the die hard fans. They won't accept any room for improvement, and thus to uphold that, they have to eschew any admission of disappointment.

> I don’t think a straight factual telling of the events would be as good as what we got,

No, it would have been better.

> You seem to be very aggressive in the attacks

No. The facts are what are aggressive. You just can't really refute them so you're demonizing them. You opened with that same projection.

> saying they abandoned integrity.

It doesn't matter whether I'm saying it or not, they did. At inception, a moral choice was made: do I tell the truth or do I not?

Consider your own life. You make choices. Will I be violent to my spouse or is that off the table? Will I steal from my employer or is that a red line I don't cross? Whether a person finds these choices hard or not isn't the main point. The main point is that breaking these lines is a choice. Some choices are akin to breaking glass. Once done, you can't undo it.

> Why are you so upset about this particular story?

Yours is an astute question.

Nuclear disinformation and false propaganda is on track to causing early destruction of society as we know it. An incredibly popular and influential piece of media like this is planting false beliefs in younger generations who won't know they've been duped until it's too late, if ever.

There's existentially dangerous hubris in thinking "oh this can only happen if a moustachioed comic villain does a bad thing, so as long as watch out for that guy, nuclear is safe and clean" or "nuclear accidents only happen when crooked Russia cheaps out on their graphite rods, so we should be good". It's a message saying "Who needs a scientific community when all we need is that one heroic (and non-existent) beautiful woman to save the day?"

It's harmful oversimplification to the point of falsehood. And it lets people handwave risks and support fatally misguided priority setting.

If "I, Tonya" wants to be a fun quasi-fiction, who cares? That won't hasten global suffering. Works like Chernobyl might. Or they have the potential to help, but don't.

I know they’re not related, but this makes me think of “The Terror”, the bad guy from The Tick, who is the opposite of scary lol

After some years, I thought that militancy would fade, but it seems like it won't.

This will be my last response because I swear to god I feel like I’m arguing with Donald Trump.

> You’re assuming wrong.

You said:

> You don’t maximize educational potential by lying to young viewers.

Why would you say that if you did not intend that the purpose should be to educate viewers?

> That’s not what I said.

You said:

> It did neither. Lots of it didn’t make sense, and by being untruthful, it was less impactful….that’s a second mistruth, and kind of a big lie considering I’ve said the opposite.

Are you going to be so pedantic as to say, “Well I didn’t say all of it didn’t make sense and I only said less impactful”?

> That’s a common logical fallacy. Popular doesn’t mean right. Or true. Or good. It just means popular.

Okay, I said ‘acclaimed’, not any of the other adjectives you used. I might use those, but I didn’t, so I don’t know what you are arguing against. Acclaimed means publicly praised and celebrated. Chernobyl has an 82 on Metacritic, meaning ‘universal acclaim’. It has a 9.0 user score on Metacritic, meaning ‘universal acclaim’. It has a 9.4 on IMDB which is 5th highest TV show of all time. A logical fallacy is faulty reasoning in the construction of an argument. My argument was as follows: 1. Most people think the show makes sense and is impactful. 2. This is made evident by the fact it gets such acclaim, as seen in the above user scores and critic scores. Where is the fallacy in that argument?

> Universally beloved. Also false.

See above. Unless you are going to be pedantic again and say that because you don’t like it, it’s not universally beloved.

> They won’t accept any improvement.

That’s not true at all, everyone loves improvement. The disagreement lies in that the things you think are necessary, I don’t think will improve the show.

> The facts are what is aggressive.

Well, again, that’s not what I have ever argued against. I have admitted that there are deviations from the factual account in the telling of the story, and that those deviations made the show better as a narrative story. You have a subjective opinion that is opposed to that, which is fine. What I opened my initial argument with is that I just disagree, and I stated the reasons for that disagreement.

I’m tired of hitting the quote button, but you are calling lies what I am calling artistic choices because they actively made the decision to not make a documentary and instead making a drama. You are arguing things I’m not arguing, and you are lying about what you are saying as shown above. I can’t tell if you’re just an angry person when it comes to this subject, or if you just don’t know how to debate honestly.

Anyways, cheers. I bear no ill will towards you, though this was pretty unpleasant. In the spirit of the people who now live in this region, Slava Ukraini.

Loved the show and the book! I think the biggest difference is that in the show it seems that whatever they're doing - whether it's all the digging or the dumping, seems like it's part of the process of fighting the disaster. But when you read the book, it turns out almost all they did was essentially misguided or not really necessary in the end.

It is intense and disturbing, but not scary imo.

The radiation's only 3.6 Roentgens, how could that be scary?

It’s kind of crazy to think about, but it’s so apparent in the book how they really had no idea what they should do. So many people were in denial that what did happen was even possible, and it was beyond the realm of any expectation they had. So it was a complete clusterfuck.

It is the most suspenseful and tense, definitely. Followed closely by The Clone Wars's Seige of Mandalore Arc and then the second to last episode of Midnight Mass.

What was interesting was how the show turned nuclear energy into a Lovecraftian monster.

He can't be the bad guy in The Tick, The Terror is dead.

They found his teeth!

Fuck yeah Jared Harris!

A lot of it was taken from Voices from Chernobyl by her, which I assume is just an alternate title. I own that one but admittedly haven’t read it just yet. She’s an amazing author though and Secondhand Time is one of the best I’ve ever read.

I always get dowvoted when I say this, but I often end up comparing it to Star War The Clone Wars's Siege of Mandalore arc. The fuckinh stress and tense waiting in both, even though Chernobyl is obviously worse because it is based in a real event which actually killed people and ruined lives.

But in both, it's just the fact that you know something bad is happening and each chance you get you want to stop it. You want things to be different and they won't be.

I like it partially because, like James Cameron's Titanic, even the fake stuff provides an excellent point of discussion. You can tell a lot of care was put into these divergences from reality.

Not great, not terrible

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I'd moreso look at whoever was the cinematographer, or the specific director for some of the episodes.

But if you loved the overall tone, Craig is showrunning The Last of Us TV series. They're not really too similar except in tension and tone a bit.

He's delusional, take him to the infirmary.

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I was rather disappointed with it and wasn’t really impressed.

In an alternate reality, David Simon has made a Chernobyl with a focus on the failing institutions of the communist state, rather than Mazin's nuclear horror version.

why would anyone want to watch a mini series about 9/11?

no wonder people hate americans(like op,who apparently doesnt realize first responders are a dead giveaway your a stupid american)

> your a stupid american

^you're. And I've found the only people who hate Americans are those who are woefully uneducated, which you appear to be.

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And Adam Nagaitis!

I get why you used the word scary to describe the show as it showed feelings of the characters having absolutely no control, no chance, and suffering hell. They made it personally realistic.

I feel you would enjoy the movie Gravity which I also compare to the same feelings and it just felt like a scary movie.

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Scary on how close it came to wiping out most of Eastern Europe.

Sad and added scary thing is you see same kinds of cover ups or down playing of risks with other stuff like chemical spills or oil leaks.

I can’t imagine them ever doing 9/11, would hit too close to home for US viewers and cause uproar surely

Horrific is how i would describe the event. Horrific catastrophe. So horror seems fitting, tho modern film has skewed our definition of horror.

Intense and gripping absolutely. Scary not in the horror sense but scary that it actually happened and all those people suffered and died for ignorance/incompetence/pride

The Looming Tower is on 9/11

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It's probably the fact that you know it all really happened.

No, the scariest ever was the MacGyver Halloween episode about the haunted house and penny's dead relatives. At least 7 yo me thinks so.

It’s a horror movie with no monster.

No

I also found it to be scary. Not in the classic ghost story way but I was very afraid for the characters and was afraid of what would happen next.

It might be another decade or two before it can be done but I don't see why it would remain forever off limits.

To me what was scary was the indifference and denial of those in charge. It's not even that they were trying to cover things up, they seemed to believe the nonsense they were spouting.

"A nuclear plant can't blow up" Dyatolov would yell, but taking a look out the window to actually see what there was never seemed to cross his mind. What he knew was all that was important. His bosses had a list of who was to blame they were going to throw under the bus. It was expected. "3.6 - not great, not terrible" even though they should know that's as high the friggin device goes. The old party hack who yelled at everyone who questioned authority, and cut off the phones so no lies could be spread.

An indifferent and uncaring authority is as scary as anything can be. The show also showed how people can work together when the shit hits the fan, despite all the hacks that think they know what's best.

It gave me nightmares. But it is so well made.

Another show that I find scary is Dopesick. Literally made me sick to my stomach. Never had a show do that to me before.

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Not even close but I sure remember episode 4 with the puppies and animals

To be fair most people by default treat nuclear energy as a lovecraftian being. Like it will inevitably be the monster that kills us all no matter who is looking after it. Chernobyl didn’t have to try hard to make it that.

Whereas if most took the time to understand the new modular nuclear reactor designs and actually had a layman understanding of how it all worked there would be less hysteria.

People still act like it’s this unworldly creature in which no matter if the smartest and most responsible humans on earth were looking after it, would kill us all.

Honestly, weirdly, I felt safer about nuclear power after this show because I saw just how hard it would be for a Chernobyl to happen again.

Love that the Chernobyl showrunner is now doing The Last of Us.

> Midnight in Chernobyl

Thanks for make me aware of this book! I will be checking this out!

Sure in a few decades maybe, but I don't know, the size of the US audience and how many people who were directly effected by it (i.e being there or losing family members) who would still be in the demographic of who you'd be marketing it towards just doesn't seem doable in my head.

Or at least it wouldn't go down without a shit storm around it

I’ve been lucky to have read some very good books already this year, but this is the best nonfiction book I have read in a very, very long time. I can almost guarantee you are going to love it.

Nah, you'd just do a timeskip near the end with the raid on Bin Laden's compound and have the scene with them unceremoniously dumping his body into the ocean and everyone would love it.

Also it's been over 2 decades, the event doesn't even hold much of a meaning to anyone under 30, or more generally anyone outside of the US. If Family Guy is allowed to do parodies of it, its open season for adaptation imo

I think OP is confusing dreadful with scary.

Chernobyl has a very intensely dreadful atmosphere that it achieves extremely well that allows the viewer to almost over-empathize with the anxiety, uncertainty, and frustration depicted in the show.

I guess to someone with low emotional intelligence they would equate that to scary or frightening, but I don't think it's the same.

Scary would be giving the viewer something to be afraid of, whether that's fictional or not, it leaves the viewer actually afraid of something. And maybe you could argue that the series makes you afraid of radiation, but I mean if anyone knows about nuclear bombs or have gotten an X-Ray, they know all the precautions taken around that(the lead aprons, and doctors behind a wall) really people should already have a healthy respect for radiation anyways.

I think there are enough books and documentaries that have the truth. It's not the responsibility of Craig Mazin, who's making a show for "entertainment", to keep to every fact. It's not his fault if people don't read the books that tell the truth. He talks about them on the website, in interviews and on the podcast

There is one, it's just invisible and everywhere

You're right. There's no law that's says something has to be excellent. It can be mediocre or full of lazy fictionalizations. But don't ask me to bless and blindly worship those flaws then, the way his followers do.

The Night Of, also on HBO, is the most terrifying TV show i've watched

The end of the second episode, when the volunteers head underneath the reactor into the dark, with just the ticking (then buzzing) Geiger counters - it’s so tense my Apple Watch asked if I was having a heart attack.

What is with this trend of calling everything terrifying and horrifying

I wouldn't say scary - A more apt description would be Harrowing.

Seeing people so blissfully unaware of what's all around them, what they're breathing - and what it'll do to them is extremely unsettling.

I think you could’ve made this without the low EQ comment and it would’ve been upvoted.

But adding the low EQ comment took this from an interesting discussion on semantics to /r/iamverysmart territory.

Emotional Intelligence has nothing to do with actual intelligence and I feel like the moment people see the word "intelligence" they just get triggered into thinking someone's calling them stupid. Coincidentally this makes the reaction to even mentioning Emotional Intelligence a litmus test for whether or not a person has a high degree of emotional intelligence.

It's not /r/iamverysmart territory because intelligence has nothing to do with emotional intelligence, it's two separate things with separate definitions.