What Makes Chernobyl Beautiful from a Screenwriting Perspective?

What makes Chernobyl beautiful from a screenwriting perspective?

Paolo Braga (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan)

Chernobyl achieved considerable critical and public acclaim. A result that couldn’t be taken for granted when the project started. The not so fashionable subject matter, its tragic nuances, the risk of addressing historical figures, events, and a society – the Soviet Union of the Eighties – that could appear unappealing, if not even too far from western contemporary culture and tastes. Greenlighting the production meant going against all odds. It ended up being a very good bet, though. What are the reasons for this surprising success?

I am going to consider this from the perspective of screenwriting. I will try to show what in the storytelling of the miniseries contributed to make it a hit. My very essential and short analysis[1] will draw on the principles of drama, character construction, and story architecture developed in the most influential screenwriting books such as Story, by Robert McKee[2], Anatomy of Story, by John Truby[3], Inside Story, by Dara Marks[4].

I believe that the first level where the success of Chernobyl should be investigated is the one of narrative structure. The showrunner, Craig Mazin, masterfully crafts the structure of the story so that the series can span the unfolding of numerous events: the accident in the plant; authorities who at first hide, then admit the emergency; the operations to contain the effects of the reactor explosion; the reclamation of an entire region; the detection of the causes; the identification of the responsibilities; the broader political and historical implications of the catastrophe.

All this is narrated through a solid and clear storyline suited to feeding tension and interest towards a satisfying ending. Thanks to this well-conceived “spine”, a complex picture on the Soviet regime and on Russian society can also be painted – with variations in pace and atmosphere, deviations on secondary characters, and moments of sorrowful reflection on the aberrations of power and propaganda. So, how was it done?

Mazin perfectly applies the technique of rising action with escalating complications. It could seem obvious – something you find in every well written script, especially in disaster stories like Chernobyl. Here a special skill was requested, the chain of complications should progressively widen the frame to embrace a cascade of consequences that happened across time, space, and political hierarchies. It should do it smoothly so that along four episodes viewers would have a complete understanding of the facts. From the chronicle of the fateful night into the plant, to its historical repercussions on the regime, which structurally resulted, like Mazin explains[5], in the following timeline: the first episode is one night, almost in real time, showing the accident; the second episode is two days, it is about becoming aware of what is really going on; episode three spans weeks, “chicken have come home to roost, and people start dying”; episode four covers months, it is “a war” with an entire population mobilized; episode five is about the trial and the historical relevance of all we have seen until then.

In other words, it was key to select the right raising points into the real events the series is based on. In practice, once the problem is solved the hero regularly faces a new one of higher scale, with a more branched out impact, requiring more complicated countermeasures. Chernobyl is structured quite simply, but brilliantly, as a sequence of tasks: ascertaining the nature of the accident; smothering the fire in the reactor with sand and boron (which must be found); drain the water from the basement of the plant and avoid a thermonuclear explosion (basically a suicidal mission, thus volunteers are needed); no more water reducing heat creates the risk of a nuclear meltdown, thus a tunnel must be dug and a heat exchanger implanted (a negotiation with coal miners starts).

What makes this recursive mechanism engaging are certainly the rising stakes, but also, and mostly, the pressure on the main character, scientist Valerij Legazov (Jared Harris). Each time he realizes that something else must still be done. The main agent of action, in fact, is him. He is the one who always has to give the bad news that a new level of the game should start. Each time, he has to convince hostile politicians, mostly worried to preserve the image of the regime, that further operations should be undertaken – operations revealing the Soviet Union as vulnerable and unprepared. On production the nickname for the Legazov character was, significantly, “Cassandra”.

Another appreciable structural move is the progressive change of the “quest” the protagonists are on. From a quest for safety (from radiation – how to handle the accident) to a quest for truth (the search for the causes of the accident and the trial in the final episode). Task after task, the chain of complications finally brings the disaster story into the terrain of the legal genre (which includes elements of detection, also used by the series to offer an intriguing crossover into the spy genre).

Here a first structural choice by the screenwriter is to imagine that the protagonists took part in the trial held by the Soviets to establish a convenient version of facts. This didn’t happen. The second choice is to prepare the ongoing plot evolution by introducing from episode 2 the character of Ulana Jurivna Khomjuk (Emily Watson). The woman, a colleague of Legazov, has no historical correspondence. Mazin created her to represent the scientific community who worked to avoid the worst. She is an investigator, who breaks the rules to interview witnesses and get the proof that will convince Legazov/“Cassandra” to give the worst possible news during the trial. It is the Soviet system itself that must be blamed for Chernobyl.

For the success of the miniseries, another level even more important than structure is character construction. I am talking of the way the three protagonists are conceived in order to function well together – with arcs that generate drama – both if considered separately and in their interactions. The point I am making is based on the general premise – the main principle of screenwriting craft – that the deepest emotions come from the internal change a character undergoes. From his/her arc of transformation.

Now, Chernobyl is basically the story of the friendship between Legazov, the scientific advisor for the politburo, and Boris Ščerbina (Stellan Skarsgård), the Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers, with the power to find the means and execute Legazov’s ideas.

For almost the entire series the arc of the scientist seems to consist in a challenge to stay faithful to his vocation to honesty – as a researcher and scholar he is someone from whom you expect the truth. Towards the end, with the discovery of past connivances with the regime, his arc suddenly twists. It becomes a redemption plot. Denouncing the system, Legazov regains his conscience, paying the price of home exile.

Accompanying Legazov, Ščerbina’s internal transformation is disillusion: organic to the apparatus, he will be left without ideals to believe in. So, here we have two powerful arcs that reciprocally resonate. The honesty of Legazov interrogates Ščerbina’s conscience, while Ščerbina’s knowledge and explanations of the mechanisms of Soviet power augments the burden on Legazov. The scientist, in order to help, has in fact to accept a certain degree of collusion (for example, in the first two episodes, keeping the secret about the real entity of the disaster).

Then there is Ulana, who doesn’t change. Again, a definite decision by Mazin. From the beginning to the end, the woman is a hound in search of truth. As such, her function is to be a force of change on the other two – someone who deprives them of easy moral ways out, leading them to the hardest and only ethical path to follow.

I pass now to consider a third level where Chernobyl’s storytelling is particularly strong, the thematic one. The series is consistently and organically written as an exploration of the value of truth (“to explore a theme” is screenwriting jargon). This is evidently announced in the opening sequence, with Legazov’s recorded words about the “cost of lies”. The overall meaning of the series could be condensed in the statement: “Truth builds the future, lies make the mistakes of the past come back worsened”.

What is noticeable is how much and how often the value at stake and the opposite idea (the forms of mendacity) find expression thanks to iconic scenes, or symbols, or verbal exchanges. All this, presented in a very natural way – as part of the action, without preachiness nor artificiality. Think for example of the marvellous vertical ray of light projected in the night sky from the exploded reactor. People of Pryp"jat', the town nearby, ignoring that it is caused by radiation, gather to contemplate its beauty – the bewitching appearance of lies, the firing plant like a Medusa. Think of the dosimeters used in the plant that exude alarming levels of radioactivity, but it is because – we will discover – those detectors can’t measure over a certain level – so, a lie hidden in a truth. Think of the dialogue where Legasov by instinct assures a bystander at his hotel that there are no risks (it is not true). Ironically, he will learn a little bit later that the woman was a KGB spy controlling him – the thousand faces of lies. Most of all, there is the final sacrifice of the hero, a moral dilemma: to pay with your life so that truth comes out, preventing other tragedies similar to Chernobyl.

Mazin’s storytelling exalts the potential of the miniseries format: long enough to narratively address the many levels of a complex topic, short enough to design compact character arcs and to stay thematically focused, like a movie.

Paolo Braga is Associate Professor at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore (Milan), where he teaches Screenwriting, Semiotics and Journalism. At Università Cattolica he also teaches at the Master in International Screenwriting and Production. He has published extensively on the topics of the construction of empathy with character and of US television series. The rhetorical and persuasive dimensions of storytelling are his general research area, which he has treated in several articles and essays. Among his most recent publications is Words in action. Forms and Techniques of Film Dialogue (Peter Lang, 2015) and Armando Fumagalli, Cassandra Albani, Paolo Braga (Eds), Storia delle serie tv (volumes 1 and 2), Dino Audino, Rome 2021.

[1] This post tackles some of the issues that I discussed in a broader piece called Analisi: Chernobyl published in Armando Fumagalli, Cassandra Albani, Paolo Braga (eds.), Storia delle serie tv. Vol. 2, Dino Audino, Roma 2021, pp. 118-129.

[2] Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principle of Screenwriting, Harper Collins, New York 1997.

[3] John Truby, The Anatomy of Story: 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller, Faber & Faber,

New York 2007

[4] Dara Marks, Inside Story: The Power of the Transformational Arc, Three Mountain Press, Studio City 2006.

[5]See Barbara Morgan, Craig Mazin, “On writing Chernobyl”,On Story.Tv – Radio – Austin Film Festival, April 11, 2020, http://www.onstory.tv/radio?rq=chernobyl.

Henry Jenkins

Henry Jenkins

Pop Junctions

Henry Jenkins

What Makes Chernobyl Beautiful from a Screenwriting Perspective?

Biography

Henry Jenkins