FAITHFUL DRAMATIZATION: CHERNOBYL, HBO
The first episode of Craig Mazin’s five-part miniseries about the Chernobyl nuclear disaster felt less like an hour of scripted television than like a panic attack involving aberrant sounds, glowing bricks, and the ominous rattle of the Geiger counter. This astonishingly detailed, frequently grisly period drama replicated the aesthetic of the 1980s Soviet Union down to its patterned tablecloths and painfully wide lapels. More important, it communicated what happens when truth is understood to be interpretative rather than inflexible. Mazin may have fudged some facts and invented some characters to serve the story, but his portrayal of how party propaganda intensified a global calamity was so unstinting that it even enraged the Russian government.
Also noteworthy: Brexit: The Uncivil War (HBO)
UNFAITHFUL DRAMATIZATION: WATCHMEN, HBO
No TV project has enraged people from its inception quite like Watchmen, Damon Lindelof’s extravagant, surreal, incomparably audacious remix of a comic-book series whose fans tend to regard it as a sacred text and whose author decries any attempts to bring it to the screen. Nevertheless, Lindelof persisted. And his nine-part HBO series, which spins off from the source material to consider the scourge of white supremacy in an alternative-timeline America, is an extraordinary work of television. The show features the superpowers of actors including Regina King, Jeremy Irons, and Jean Smart. It has the weird flourishes that have come to be Lindelof’s signature—the striking visual symbols and out-of-body interludes that defined Lost and The Leftovers. And most crucially, it offers up a deft examination of how deeply racism is embedded in American history.
Also noteworthy: Dickinson (Apple TV+)
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