Chernobyl

The explosion is only the beginning of Chernobyl. Craig Mazin and Johan Renck's miniseries follows people trying to understand a disaster while others struggle to admit its size. A fact that cannot safely be spoken becomes another danger to the people expected to deal with it.

Jared Harris, Stellan Skarsgård and Emily Watson give the technical and bureaucratic arguments human urgency. The explanations matter because decisions depend on them. A meeting can be frightening without a raised voice when the wrong answer is the one everybody wants to hear.

The series also makes room for workers, residents and responders who have little control over the information reaching them. Its most effective passages show a task being carried out under conditions that the person doing it cannot fully understand.

This is dramatised history, with compressed events and composite elements, rather than a documentary record. As television, it is exceptionally focused and often distressing. Dopesick provides another strong drama about evidence, institutional reassurance and the cost of refusing to reconsider a profitable or convenient story.