The Horror of Knowing: Catastrophe and Meaning in HBO’s ‘Chernobyl’

By Louis Bayman

The five-part miniseries Chernobyl has become the popular television phenomenon of the year, and one of the most critically successful ever. Over thirty years since the explosion at the core of a nuclear reactor in 1986, the production has been praised for its fidelity both to the events around the disaster and to the look and feel of the Soviet 1980s. This has in turn prompted a backlash…