The Big Picture - A 'Chernobyl' Deep Dive With Creator Craig Mazin and Mallory Rubin | The Big Picture

Episode Date: June 4, 2019

Sean is joined by Mallory Rubin to react as fans to HBO’s ‘Chernobyl’—a science-laden docudrama that snuck up as one of the best shows on television this year (1:00). Then showrunner Craig Mazin comes to the studio to talk about making the jump from film to TV and how writing for feature-length comedy prepared him for conveying a real-life tragedy on screen (37:00). Host: Sean Fennessey Guest: Mallory Rubin and Craig Mazin Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey guys, welcome to the Ringer Podcast Network. It's Liz Kelley, host of Tea Time. Exciting news happening across the podcast network. Your favorite celebrity and pop culture podcasts are moving out of Channel 33 and into their very own feed called Ringer Dish. On Ringer Dish, you can still listen to Jam Session on Wednesdays and Tea Time on Fridays, and we'll be launching a brand new show that'll publish every Monday, starting with a deep dive on J-Lo and Ben Affleck's infamous relationship hosted by Amanda Dobbins and Juliette Lipman.

So to hear more about the royal family and our current celebrity obsessions, subscribe to Ring Your Dish on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Sean Fantasy, editor-in-chief of The Ringer, and this is The Big Picture, a conversation show about TV. Just this one time. And that's because the most incredible thing

I've seen on television this year, and really in some time, has just concluded. I'm talking, of course, about Chernobyl, the HBO miniseries chronicling the devastating nuclear disaster that occurred on April 26th, 1986, near the city of Pripyat in the former Soviet Union. Later in the show, I'll be speaking with creator,

writer, producer Craig Mazin, who will help me understand how he pulled off this extraordinary feat. But first, I am joined by fellow Chernobyl admirer and Ringer executive editor, Mallory Rubin. Hello, Mal. Hello. Mal, you are a voice in the darkness. You are a Soviet miner in the Chernobyl Admiration Society.

Months ago, I saw a screener of the show and I was like, this is extraordinary. It's incredible how powerful and beautifully done this very sad, gripping, physically upsetting story is. Crickets. No one had seen a screener. People were actively making fun of you. It became a bit. And I certainly feel vindicated. Not just because you like it, but because a great many people have come to appreciate this show. But tell me a little bit about your journey. You had been living in Westeros for quite some time. That's right.

And then this show came to you and very quickly you started to consume it. Yeah, I joined a few weeks late, Memorial Day weekend. In fact, so I'm a recent convert. Truly a binge then. As you know, it's something of a habit of mine. I, as you said, wrapped up with Thrones and I needed to reconnect to the wider culture, wanted a little, you know, joy in my life. And I thought, what better way to connect to my fellow man and rediscover my own humanity than Chernobyl?

But all jokes aside, you know, you had spoken so highly of it. And there was something appealing to me about the fact that it was a miniseries. I was going to be able to consume it all fairly quickly. Started watching it early in the weekend. So three episodes were out at that point in time. And I watched all three in a row and then was consumed with almost like a surprisingly dangerous rage that I could not immediately access the final two episodes. And then I watched both of those, obviously, when they aired. And in the case of the finale, when you were kind enough to provide me with a screener.

That's why we're here right now. I had a very similar experience. I watched the first episode, like I said, months ago with my wife. And we were both very taken. But then also, well, we wanted to keep watching it. But we knew that it would be part of the kind of conversation cycle. But also, there was something about letting a show like this unfold slowly that I think is powerful, too. No offense to binging in general.

I respect that approach to culture. But I did appreciate the slow rollout, and we sort of parceled it out for ourselves in that way. And I think part of the reason that you need to do that is because there's just a really deep emotional toll that this show wages on its viewers. Because of its, you know, not just the physical terror that you get from it, but just considering the absolute awful scope of what happened in these events. I'm not sure if you were alive when the Chernobyl disaster happened. I was not. I was born later that year, September 86. So April 26, 86 is my good friend David Shapiro's birthday.

Well, congratulations to David. I hope he wasn't- When my mom met him for the first time, she said Chernobyl. I presume he was not in Chernobyl when he was born. No, no, Cleveland. Thank goodness. What was your level of awareness of this event? Throughout the course of my life, you know, I think probably

similar to what it was for many people who came to this show, which is an awareness that a disaster had happened and then little else beyond that. And actually, I started listening to the podcast that the HBO was put out around the show, the official podcast, Chernobyl the podcast. I believe it's the Chernobyl podcast. The Chernobyl podcast. And that's out there right away as motivation for creating it in the first place was this complete void for certainly not everyone, but wide swaths of people about what actually happened here and why. And so in that sense, I think ultimately parceling it out week after week instead of all at once is actually very

fitting because you as a viewer obviously not equating the experience of the viewer with the experience of somebody on the ground but it manufactures that sense of protracted discovery and your desire is so fierce to understand how what how could this have possibly happened especially when you realize that it was a safety test that led to this all. It's just such an incongruous set of initial facts that you're so desperate to learn and the fact that you can't get to the truth right away and that, in fact, suffocating the truth is really the entire point for so many people is this unbelievably frustrating but also compelling propulsive force throughout the rest of the show yeah the eagerness to understand i think is the driving force

especially of the first two episodes which play a lot more sort of like a murder mystery you know we're thrust almost immediately into this very quiet setting where this huge disaster happens there's no there's really not a lot of preamble before we get to the actual disaster right and then the i mean the preamble is the suicide of the protagonist. That's right. That's right, which is also a kind of a sleight of hand as a storytelling device. But there's something so unusual about the way

that everything is meted out here, but also it kind of drags you along. And then once things get extremely intense by episodes three and four, you kind of can't turn away, even though we start to fully understand why some of these things happened. Until we get to episode five, when we realize that we don't actually know why certain

things happened, that more people had more information than we originally thought. It's really kind of a masterful Sherlock Holmesian kind of design for telling the story. I think a lot of times with docudrama, you tend to get something that is very earnest, that is very straightforward, that is very chronological. Now, this is told chronologically, except for that sort of opening sequence you referenced, but a lot of information is withheld, and the way that it's withheld is very powerful. For you, is this a kind of a format, a kind of real-life story that you like? Because when I think of your passions, I think of, you know, Harry Potter, of course, and Game of Thrones, and the MCU, just things that are more fantastical. This is really hard line down the middle, in many ways, journalism.

Yeah. Well, I've devoted my life and career to journalism, as you know. That's true. No, it's a good point. It's a good question. the things that I really love about sci-fi or fantasy stories, which is how I spend so much of my time as a consumer of literature, film, television, everything, conversations with my friends. Of course, I love the idea of dragons and direwolves and waving your wand and making anything that you want possible. But the thing that I really love about those stories is tapping

into something core about human nature. And so any great story can deliver that. And obviously the place that you're going to get that the most fully formed is something that is literally about confronting humanity and what people are willing to do to each other and what they're willing to do when they see what other people are willing to do to each other. And I was riveted every single second of this experience like I it's so upsetting and horrifying to watch that it doesn't feel like a normal thing to say but I can't wait to watch it again and part of that is because I think to your point about how much you find out in the finale actually how much is sort of held back for this reveal even though though it is real-world history that we're talking about, and that seems sort of like a contrary thing to say. I'm fascinated to then rewatch it with that in mind, but also because it is just such a pitch-perfect case study

in some of the themes that I cherish so much, you know, the idea of truth and lies. What is heroism? What kind of forms can that really take? When you're talking about storytelling, what is the role and power of image and narrative? And it's pretty hard right now in 2019 in the United States of America to watch Chernobyl and not think about our current political system and the role of truth and lies in the narratives that unfold around us every day. And so that was interesting, too, to simultaneously gain newfound understanding of this seismic historic event and also, like with any great story, be able to apply it to something in your current life. Is it important that you learn things when you're watching something like this?

Because everything that you're talking about is thematic. You know, it's essentially emotional or it's intellectual, but it's not fact-based per se. And, you know, it's funny, we've been having this conversation in the office, a handful of us, about sort of dad nonfiction, you know, the canon of- A handful, you and Kevin Clark. Me and Kevin Clark. Continue. No, there were a few more participants, but shout out to Brian Phillips. But they're a

small group of people that there's a sort of strand of culture and history books that are targeted at what we presume to be a 55-year-old white guy in pleated pants who's just come off the golf course and received his Father's Day gift from his hopeful son or daughter. And inevitably, that book is about a general in World War I. Right. It's based on a world historical event. More than likely, it's got a certain kind of, you know, pursuit of those, some of those themes you're talking about, heroism, truth and lies, but there's something kind of stayed about it. I think Chernobyl in some ways falls into this category. And in fact, a lot of this series is based on a book, Voices of Chernobyl, but there's something somehow different about it. For you personally, are you kind of questing

for information and then will you then bring that to the bar and tell everyone what you learned? Or is it much more of a televisual emotional experience? I think both. And I think that one of the reasons that I really not only enjoyed the show, but thought it was such a grand achievement is because it clearly can be either of those things for you. And that's valid. However you choose to consume it is valid. You know, we talked about this a bit over the weekend. I was so impressed by the show's handling of the science because I am, just in the interest of candor, not a physicist, not a nuclear scientist. What? You've lied on your resume. Can barely do math.

We've been working together for five years and little did I know. And so I was actually a little bit concerned about that heading in. Not that it ever felt like a true barrier to entry, but you worry about both extremes, I think. On the one hand, is this going to be so dumbed down for the general viewing public that it basically feels like it isn't real? That you can't believe in who those characters are and in the work that they're supposed to be doing because there's no way that people like that would talk that way about their work. On the other extreme, is it going to be so scientifically precise that it's totally alienating for somebody who,

for whom that's not their vernacular or something that they're comfortable with at all. And I thought that the show's ability to thread the needle between those two things and allow you to understand with, now I'm not implying that we're coming out of this as nuclear experts. Good news everyone, We're physicists now. But with the basic ability to comprehend what they were talking about, what was happening, without making it too complex or making it feel like they were condescending and speaking down to you.

I think that the great trick there was positioning some of the other characters on the show in the same seat that the viewer was in. You know, and I think, for example, of one of the earlier scenes in the show when Legasov and Boris are first heading out and they're on the plane. And Legasov is sketching this out because Boris is demanding that he explain it to him. And the bullets analogy that was so instantly clarifying similarly the trial in the finale do we understand every single thing that was on all of those placards the tiles no but they were color-coded and the the thing that was unambiguous was that balance was the key. And that once you lost that, you lost the ability to control the thing that needed to be controlled. And I just thought that, okay, I don't need to be coming to this as somebody who is like inherently obsessed with the science or the facts, but I feel like I can grasp them. And then because I have that base comfort, I am then able to shift my focus to the things that I personally care more about, the themes, the characters, the choices that they're making. And I think that if you probably are in the far extreme of caring about

the science, I'm sure that there are plenty of people out there who are like, fact check on X, Y, and Z. And I think that one of the cool things is that the creators have not in any way implied that it is a note-for-note, faithful rendering of history. You know, that there are... For example, the Ulana character is a composite of all these other scientists. And I think saying that...

Dozens of other scientists. Right. Saying that in the... It was either the first or the second Inside the Episode featurette that we heard that. And then it's also, you know, noted in the the run through of facts at the end of the finale. So what about you? Well, I think that there's a brilliant storytelling choice that also happens to be true to history, which is that every single character who is not LaGossa for most of the film is completely ignorant to explain things to bureaucrats, politicians, and criminals at all times, and soldiers, and miners, and the necessity of explication.

A lot of times when we see a moment of exposition in a TV show or in a movie, we make fun of it because we can see it's transparent to us what is trying to happen. But in this case, in order to feel closer to understanding what had happened here, we need these series of scientific explanations used with clear-minded metaphor or visual cues. And part of that, I think, is just, and I don't want to get too far ahead by talking about the cast yet, is just Jared Harris is one of those people that people just like to hear explain things, to talk. He's the best. Lane Price and his character from The Terror. There's this history of characters that he has done. And you mentioned Fringe. Where are my Fringe heads at? I did not get too deep into the series Fringe. Oh, that's great. He has this remarkable

soliloquizing ability. He tends to get very emotionally, sort of angrily engaged when he's exploring things like this. Yes. And it draws you in as a viewer. I think with a different kind of actor, this sort of dialogue wouldn't work. These people are perfectly brought in. And likewise, Stellan Skarsgård, who is

sort of doing the inverse of his Good Will Hunting character, you know what I mean? He sort of has none of the information in the world, none of the math, none of the science. And so he is a great proxy for us. And then later in the film, as you pointed out, with that color-coded explication that he's doing, you have these bureaucratic judges, these Soviet apparatchiks, and they are

probably dumber than Stellan Skarsgård's character. So putting us in that position is great. I personally, as I said, as an admirer of some dad nonfiction, I liked learning a lot, and I felt like I took a lot away from it. It was funny, when my wife and I watched the first episode,

she immediately just looked at the Wikipedia page and just read everything that happened at Chernobyl, and started reading a lot about Chernobyl. Yeah, I did that too. You did that too. Okay. So I don't have that impulse. I'm a bit spoiler-phobic, as you know.

And that's a ridiculous thing to say. He's those real life spoilers. Well, but that is a way that we have been, I don't know, systematized into viewing culture. And even though this is a real event that had literally the worst possible stakes, the darkest possible stakes, it's still a story. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. I personally want to engage with it as a story.

And so I didn't really read anything about it. I certainly knew a bit about Chernobyl, but I learned so much more and I appreciated it so much more by watching it in this way. So I am curious to hear what you think about this strategy that I probably not totally consciously set out upon. I waited to try to learn about the big stuff until the end because I assumed that we were heading for this moment of great consequence in the finale. The explosion happens in the first 10 minutes, though. But we don't know why. You know, the failsafe becomes the detonator and all of that. All the things that are there.

So much talk of graphite and boron. I'm just taking right back to the periodic table. Incredible times. Graphite. Graphite on the roof, man. It's right there. You see it with your eyes. You can't ignore what you see with your eyes.

Specific things I found that I needed to research immediately. For example, the miners and the animals. Like episode three, the miners, episode four, the animals. Those were things that I just, I couldn't stop thinking about. It just burrowed into my brain in really, really upsetting fashion. And I kind of like couldn't find peace. Not that I came to find it ever. But I had just had to know more about what had happened in those specific respects. And I waited to start listening to the podcast until after finishing the series because I thought that there was some, to your point, some risk there. Even though it seems like maybe there isn't. Ultimately, they're trying to really contain it to this is what happens in this episode. But I thought that there might be some risk there in learning more about kind of the grand design of the entire production and i wanted to save that until i had seen the whole thing but once i saw those animals i just not ready to talk about the animals and mal is not

crying but we'll see if we can get her there i that was when i knew that we should chat about this because i knew that that would upset you greatly that that. I believe that's the fourth episode. Yeah. Extremely upsetting series of circumstances lead to the necessary assassination of several animals scattered across the Soviet Union because they, of course, can transfer radiation because the entire huge swaths of land, thousands of kilometers have been irradiated. I guess let's talk about the decision to use English actors because I think when the show first started and I was in my evangelizing period, a handful of our colleagues here, God bless all of them. We're like, this show is stupid. Why are these people speaking in English accents? That's right. And, you know, certainly there. We have a handful of communists on staff.

It's a good point. They just wanted an authentic Russian experience and they were, they didn't get it. And I've heard Craig Mazin talk about this and I'll speak with him about it too, but the desire to avoid the sort of Boris and Natasha Rocky and Bullwinkle aspect where you have, you know, gifted English speaking actors attempting to kind of throw on that heavy Minsk accent is problematic in telling a story and leads to a lot of ridiculousness. There was a movie that came out in 2018 called The Death of Stalin, a comedy by Armando Iannucci that sort of plays on that idea with the English actors also applying some ridiculous Russian-ness, shall we call it? We talked about Jared Harris.

What did you think about this decision to use the English actors and weird and alienating for, I would say, maybe the first 15 minutes, 20 minutes, you know, and then the story is just so instantly myself uh totally buying into the logic behind the choice you know of not wanting to create something that felt in any way like parody a cultural parody or like that took you out of it because you were thinking more about the accent the character the actor was affecting than the things that they were saying and the things that they were doing, which is ultimately the more important point. So I was sort of jarred by it right away and I got over it very, very quickly. The cast I thought was absolutely tremendous. I did not know who the bulk of these people were, which is pretty cool. I think anytime you're introduced to new people and are just

totally taken by the work that they're doing, you know, the like, for example, not to always just return to the animal sequence and be as on brand as I could possibly be. But, you know, Pavel is the point of view character for us there. But the guy who's giving him his orders i don't know who that person is and he was like tremendous it's like this person should be famous and in all sorts of movies after this i have no idea who that person is i've never seen him in anything i honestly don't ralph innocent i believe his name is is that the actor's name just mesmerizing to watch and And I do, I just, I love basically anything that Jared Harris does. I think that he is such a soothing presence,

as you said, and really just, you believe that he is the person that you're watching, that he's supposed to be. And I thought that in this role in particular, he did a really good job of making you believe that he was somebody who could be full of dread and fear and panic and also find a way to instantly occupy this position of authority and get people to trust him and believe in him and convince other people to follow him which is hard especially in the soviet union and i really really really loved the stellenskars guard performance i thought i just thought that he was great and the vulnerability especially toward the end was just really sad and touching he's the one character who i felt like had an actual arc as well you know he came to

learn something he came to understand something about himself that many of the other characters don't. I actually believe that the actor that you're referring to who is working with Pavel is named Faris. Faris? And I'm going to show you a photo of him right now just so you get a sense of what he looks like. Oh, my God.

In this photo on his Wikipedia page, he is clutch looks like. Oh, my God. In this photo on his Wikipedia page, he is clutching a sort of a flying V guitar and looks like a bit of a, I don't even know how to describe him, sort of a post-Iron Maiden heavy metal rock star. Apparently, he's a very decorated actor born in Beirut of Swedish origin. Nevertheless, Ferris Ferris, great for him.

I think I agree, though. The cast is incredible. There's a young actress in the show called Jessie Buckley, who is my favorite actress now in the world that I've mentioned in this podcast before. She's appearing in a movie later this month called Wild Rose. She's great. She's quite blonde in this film.

She's quite red-haired in other walks of life. She has... I wonder why you like her. An interesting... An interesting part in this show. She is the only character,

I think, who doesn't really intersect with any other characters on this show. She only really intersects with her husband, who, of course, is a firefighter

who is exposed to the radiation. Her character's name is Ludmilla. Gets a real lecture from Ulana at one point. That's true. You're right. She does have that one moment, which is fascinating. And she is probably the biggest proxy character that we have

because she's just a normal citizen who is affected by this. What did you think about using someone like that as sort of a POV character, as you would say, in Thrones? I loved it, and I loved that strategy across the board. You know, I'm sure that the families of all of the scientists, for example, who aren't in the show are outraged to some extent that the work of those people has been compressed into one character in lana but i think ultimately that for viewers there is something really orienting about being able to say okay legasov and lana represent science and the effort to pursue truth over lies boris is going to be our insight into the sliver inside the bureaucracy of the person who is willing to say, well, I saw something that

I actually can't ignore despite a lifetime of training to obey the state above all else. Jesse's character Ignatenko is our access point to the families, all those people on the bridge, all of whom died, we learn in the horrifying facts that play across our screen at the end, what it was like if you just were a person in the world there, just a person who had somebody next to you who you loved and you said, is it safe to go to work tonight? And you heard, yes, it is. And then that was basically the end of your life. That part of your life is you knew it. Obviously, everything that happens with her pregnancy is like just devastatingly sad.

I think the thing in the facts at the end of the finale that made me cry the most was learning that she did have a child later in life. It's wonderful. There are the tears. The tears have arrived. Incredible. Life finds a way but pavel's character as our access point to what would it be like if you were just this person who wasn't actually in the military who was not used to having to do these things and you were

called upon to serve and to do something that most human beings could never bring themselves to even conceive upon let let alone carry through. The mining boss. Unbelievable. Extraordinary performance. Great character. And, you know, it was interesting listening to Mazin talk about this on the Chernobyl podcast, but just the power that miners had, not just in the sort of consciousness of the Soviet Union,

but literally the power. You have the coal, you have the power. Gorbachev famously sort of said that he was afraid of these coal miners. Yes, so that's a perfect example, actually, because again, it gives you one person, you know, we see these other miners, we see them working, we see them walking naked into the site of their labor. We hear this horrifying exchange about, you know, will they be looked after? And the answer is no. But the mining bosses really are our only actual insight into what these people are like.

You know, of course, shouts to the homie G.R. Mormont who comes by. A lot of Thrones bit players in this. Truly, truly. To think about not only what his role and their role was in this disaster, but in all of society. Like, to allow one character and one role to unlock so much for us about the function of a certain type of person in that world is just an incredible achievement. It's

really miraculous. And so I thought all of that was really marvelous. And similarly, the way it was structured across episodes, you know, you have this compulsion as a viewer to say, all right, I want to return to those people. I want to know if the miners are okay. I want to know how Pavel is dealing with this emotional stress from what he had to do. But ultimately, there's something about the choice to never return to those people that feels very true to life. You know, you were called to do this thing, and then they kind of forgot about you. One of the most amazing things, I think,

about the design of the series, too, is each episode essentially is oriented around a single act of heroism that explains the toll that this took on this nation. So in some cases, it's Legasov in the final episode, essentially sacrificing himself, sacrificing his career, his credibility, his ability to be a

Soviet hero by testifying in full candor in the way that he does. In other cases, it's the miners that you're talking about who are giving their lives. In other cases, it's the soldiers who go on the roof and scoop the graphite, which to me was the most, you struggled the most with the animals. I struggled the most with that incredible first-person visualization of what those men did when they went on the roof and they scooped burning graphite off of the roof in order to essentially create a dome around the nuclear reactor. The divers. And then the divers. Oh, my God. Which also is just truly harrowing and amazing.

And that end note card that those three men are still alive is absolutely amazing. It's astonishing. And there are so many times when I was watching the series where I just thought, wow, wow. And I'm so jaded and cynical when consuming pretty much anything on a screen these days. And this had the authentically empowering experience of there's so much I don't know. There's so much I don't know. You know, there's so much I don't know. Yeah. And, you know, to return to your earlier question about just the desire to learn something about

not only this event, but about life in the world. You know, Mazin talked about this on the first episode of the Chernobyl pod, but this idea that a lot of people in the world tend to think, OK, of course, this could only happen in the Soviet. But his the way he flipped that and said the recovery also only could have happened here because you had these people who were willing to do these extraordinary things that I mean, that wouldn't happen here. Absolutely not. You would never see people say, I'm willing to do this thing and to see it in that scale. And now this ultimately is not a podcast about politics or societies.

And I am certainly not advocating for that way of life. But I do think it's an incredible achievement to get the viewer to understand that in a new way and appreciate some aspect of it, to appreciate why a person would have made that choice, what their life was like, what the realities of the society in which they exist and all of their family and friends exist, you know, what it meant to have to say, all right, well, I'm going to do this thing and I know I'm not going to come out. And if you did, that's incredible, but you're probably not going to. Or to not know that because nobody would tell you that. But for that to not matter because you were propelled forward by just the reality of the system in which you exist. That's horrifying in a lot of respects. But it's just,

it's I think maybe not something that a lot of the stories built around the Soviet Union pay any attention to at all. And so I think just that part of it, I was grateful for that we were allowed to see what this was like for every single person. the animals. That was really the incredible thing about it was just the scope, you know, that you were, you were, the show was not going to allow you to ignore any aspect of what this touched. It's a, it's a fascinating kind of literally once in a, once in a century sort of event. I mean, you mentioned the structure of the society that had been built in the Soviet Union at that time, which had basically been standing for almost three generations. And so you have these people who are, you know, essentially understand clearly what their role in society is, which is that they are a part of the nation state. They are the worker force. And so no matter what they are asked, they must do it. And I agree that at least in the way that they've done it in this real life event and in this series, the United States probably isn't going to do this. Even something as straightforward as evacuating a city would be an absolute disaster in this nation of ours in which everyone thinks that they are the most important person that has ever been born. And there is something so interesting about finding it in this moment in history and then very closely unpacking the ramifications for every single person. It's notable, of course, that the Soviet Union falls very shortly after this happens.

And in many ways, this kind of breaks the nation. It breaks this collective because it reveals that truth and lies are vital to organizing a people. And the fact that these people have been lied to for so long and also been spent out of existence by our president, Ronald Reagan, indicates really ultimately that life and death and also the future shape of political societies is the end result of a lot of what happens here. So it is really the grandest scale story that you can tell. I don't know if you could make a film or a TV series or write a book about something more consequential, which is, I feel fortunate to be talking about it with you. Anything else you want to say about Chernobyl? You know, I found the decision to

highlight some of the bad things that Legasov had done in his life, in his career. Very important. And I was glad that the show did that because it did not, in my mind at least, undermine his standing as a hero. It reinforced an idea that I really cherish as a consumer of stories, which is you don't have to be perfect to be a hero. Anybody can be a hero. What is heroism? Actually, it's not always doing the right thing. It's realizing that you haven't always done the right thing and finding the courage in your fear to do the right thing when it matters most and so in that chill inducing sequence after his testimony at the trial when the KGB head comes in to talk to him you know why worry about things that aren't going to happen I mean that was like holy shit

and he's listing some of his transgressions his past transgressions the things that he has done when he like all these other people is just a cog in the wheel, a part of the state, a part of the machine. And it's like this was not a perfect guy. You know, the point was never that he was a perfect guy. Even something like earlier on the show, his decision to use the sand and then Ulana coming in and saying, well, that's going to melt through to the core. You know, even on the science side, he wasn't always making the right choices he was never presented as this infallible figure he was a person just a person in the world trying to do something that seemed every step of the way impossible for one reason or another either

because they didn't understand or because once they did, it was too scary to think about what that understanding meant. And I just think that's like such an incredible choice and really requires an unbelievable amount of discipline on the creator's part to say, you know, we're not deifying this person. And in that sense, opening with the suicide rather than building up to it, I think was also brilliant because especially in a show about this much destruction and despair, it actually wouldn't have felt right to say that the conclusion in some way was one death because part of the point is that we don't actually know what the toll was, what the cost was, what was the cost of the lies, right? We don't know, actually. It's like unbelievably horrifying all this time later to still not even understand the scope of this. And you think about what this looks like today,

the size of the exclusion zone, still, this is not somewhere people can live. And that yet, it's this new Eden. Like if you read about it now, that's how it's described in a lot of places, wildlife everywhere, flora, fauna, and still scientists trying to unpack what happened there to understand how and when life could ever return. I just think that's so endlessly fascinating. And I also really liked, with Legasov but in general, the way that the show explored the idea of like legacy and image not to always compare everything to Game of Thrones but I found myself thinking about the

Sam brand exchange about memory and like that's what death is it's people forget you and the idea that it's getting emotional because it's like, hold it together. We're almost there. It's just really powerful. You know, on the one hand, his life was over already.

He was literally dying. I mean, these people were all dying. Yes. They're all, they exposed themselves literally to the radiation. So, okay.

That's a fact that we know is true but still to find the courage to say these things that you know are going to alter your life forever and to do it knowing that it might not matter is like devastating and i think it's just incredible that it did matter you know that the the truth got out eventually that's an incredible testament to the power of perseverance and the human spirit. If there's one thing that we've learned on HBO this spring, whether it's on Game of Thrones or Veep or Barry. Love Veep. Love Barry. Or Chernobyl.

I believe it's that cities will burn and men will fall. Mallory, this has been a very edifying conversation. Thanks for doing it. Thank you. Thanks again to the great Mallory Rubin. Now let's go to my conversation with Chernobyl creator, writer, producer, Craig Mazin. Sincerely delighted to be joined by Craig Mazin,

creator, writer, producer, godfather of Chernobyl. Craig, thanks for coming in. What a weird title to have. Thank you. Very strange. Glad to be here. Complex. Hopefully we'll have a happy conversation about a very devastating thing. We'll try. Okay. I only know your name for a couple of reasons. One, I know you're writing credits,

mostly comedy, and I know your podcast work. The podcast work. And so I'm fascinated why this story, because it does not feel in line with pretty much any of the work that you've done in your career that I'm at least publicly aware of. Right. Well, publicly aware of that's a big one. But also I think that there is a gulf for everyone. I honestly believe this, a gulf between what you are paid to do and what you are capable of doing or would naturally do if left to your own devices. Because Hollywood requires certain kinds of things to be made. that seemingly are able to do it repeatedly and repeatedly and, um, and do it with some sort of box office success on the other end of it.

So what happens is you're a bit like a left-handed pitcher and they kind of need you to come out of the pen and it's like, your job is to go and get the lefty out. That's it. And you say, well, but left to my own devices, I would be playing shortstop. And they say, that's great. Get the left-hander out. That's what we need from you. Here's, this is the money that we are going to pay you to do these things. And you have a job and you have career and all these things you have to, but at some point, somewhere along the way, you find something and think, this is what I would do

if left to my own devices and someone lets you do it. And for me, that was Chernobyl. Was this literally the first thing of this kind that you had said, I'm going to throw myself into this all the way and try to make it happen? Yes. So that's fascinating to me. So when did you first encounter this story in this way? Because obviously you were alive when it happened. But I think like many people, there's a kind of a lack of information.

There's a general awareness of the disastrous nature of the event. Right. And then that's kind of it. So what was the triggering point for you saying, I have to throw myself into this? In a weird way, the way you just described it was part of the triggering point. Anytime you're walking around, I mean, this is why studios will do things that seemingly are stupid and also factually are stupid. Like, let's try and make a movie out of the board game Monopoly. Why? Because everybody knows Monopoly, right? It's a thing that's just there.

Well, that's Chernobyl. Everybody knows Chernobyl. If, and I would say, if you were to ask anybody around here of any age, what happened to the Titanic, they will tell you it sank. And if you were to say how, they would say iceberg. What happened to Chernobyl? Blew up. How? Silence. And that in and of itself is fascinating to me. And that's actually how I got started researching Chernobyl. It was just a simple reflective question. Why do I not know something like how it explains? It just seems bizarre. It was just curiosity. I wasn't intending on researching anything i just it was one of those internet nights and what i read blew my mind and

what i kept reading blew it even further and further and then i just was compelled there's an extraordinary amount of information in the series and there's obviously i'm sure a ton that you had to leave out of the series how do you determine what this actually is is? How do you realize, ah, it's actually not a feature film? Because you don't have a lot of television experience. Zero. I have zero television experience. This is the only thing I've ever done in television. That's fascinating.

So did you know immediately this has to be a miniseries? Apparently I should be doing television, by the way. I wonder what you'll do next. Well, this, so my, my interest in relaying this as a narrative on screen really emerged in 2014. And it was just around the time when formats were starting to become flexible. If you were to say, oh, someone's making a miniseries, the miniseries was some kind of junky network event where they do a novel or something. I was thinking of the Stephen King adaptations on ABC in the 90s. Correct. It's sort of like an ABC miniseries event, right? Or a rip from the headlines, you know, the Lorena Bobbitt miniseries or something.

There was a certain junkiness kind of attached to all of it. And then this beautiful format that the UK was already very heavily invested in, which is make six episodes. That's great. It started to come over here. And this is before Netflix really went bananas with all that. But you started to see it happening. And I thought, well, that's it.

That's, that is a format in which you can tell the story. I could not tell it as a movie, no way, shape or form. It's definitely not an ongoing series, but this, yes. And so I went with Carolyn Strauss, who is another one of our executive producers. And we went over to HBO and said, yeah. And they said, eh. That was it. I read that you wrote these parts, these sort of three key parts for the actors who are portraying these people. Yes. I'm fascinated by that in general. But also, that feels like a tough sell because a lot of times these shows that you're describing, these miniseries, are often bound and determined to have very famous people. We see what happened with something like Big Little Lies also on HBO.

It's Oscar winners in that series. Jared Harris, Dylan Skarsgård, Emily Watson, hugely gifted performers, very well known. Oscar nominations in there. There are, but not stars per se. Well, not of the like a Meryl Streep kind of thing where middle America would say, oh yes, you know, I love to watch all of Emily Watson's, you know, I understand that. But was that a challenge at all? Because even if you're, you know that these are the right people and you're pitching it for them. It was, it wasn't. First of all, I'm, you know, I've been around long enough to know there are certain things

you do where you think this is going to need one of those, right? In order to, to justify whatever it is that we're doing here and to justify people's attention, at least one person, we're going to need to pull them in on one type of person there from a kind of just populist point of view. For Chernobyl, I didn't feel that at all. For Chernobyl, I felt what pulls them in is this concept. The concept is compelling and the concept is the star, the tragedy. In fact, the more ordinary and unknown a lot of these people are, I think the more honest it will feel.

The second you put somebody in there that has an enormous amount of baggage for the audience, the second you have started to transform this into a thing about them and not a thing about people dealing with a thing. I thought that Jared and Emily and Stellan were these wonderful prototypes for these kinds of characters I was creating. I was lucky enough that they all said they would do it. That's never going to happen to me again. It was amazing. And at no point, literally no point, did HBO blink. I mean, they never said, and I kind of was honest from the start. I said, look, if you want

this to be, no offense to Tom Cruise, he's a great actor, he's a huge movie star, but if you want this to be Tom Cruise goes and solves Chernobyl, that's not what this is. It can't be. It just won't feel authentic. What did you and Carolyn actually bring to HBO? Do you have five scripts at that point? Do you just have a sketch of what you want to do? Yeah. I mean, we brought ourselves and we had a conversation and basically I revealed to, uh, Carrie Ann Tholes, who was the head of miniseries at HBO. I just said, let me just tell you some stories. Let me describe the kind of show I want to make. And let me give you a rough sense of how it lays out.

At the time I was thinking of six episodes, it became five. And, and let me just tell you some of the fascinating stories inside of it and what it is I want to impart and what it is that I don't want to do. And he, that was it. That's all it took. I mean, look, it's not a huge commitment from there to say, okay, we'll buy this and you're going to write a script and then we'll read a script for a episode and decide what we want to go do from there. But every step of the way, it was just every step of the way. It's the weirdest. I've never had it like this, where it was just lovely.

It's almost like they should trust creative people more. I feel like you hear this story over and over again. They like let somebody be in charge of something. I mean, look, I don't want to necessarily throw a bunch of credit on myself that I don't deserve. I will simply observe that I've been doing this for a long time and this is the first time anyone's let me do what I want to do. So I'll leave that there. Well, describe that for me though, because you know, you have a series of titles on this and historically, I don't think you've had a series of titles. Not some, you have some producer credits, but not in the same way.

What is it like when you're designing a show like this? You're on set every day? You're choosing every craftsperson? What role does a person play in a miniseries like this? Yeah. So as the executive producer and essentially showrunner of this limited series, you are the creative. You're the ultimate creative authority. So you do have, um, you serve both as the writer and you also serve as the way a producer does in movies.

You're kind of in charge of the machinery. That means you do have a say over who is going to direct it and who is going to act in it and who the department heads are and where you're going to shoot. And you also have, you're consulted on marketing and budget and everything like this, right? For me, it wasn't actually a major change because for a long time now in features, there's this interesting phenomenon. John August and I call it screenwriter plus. You're a screenwriter. The producer is in charge of the movie and the director has the creative authority.

But the studio will come back to you and say, yeah, we need you to solve these problems. But you have to do it quietly. And so you do. So for a long time, you kind of serve as a shadow authority without authority. And so I've, I look, I have a lot of experience being on set and dealing with actors and dealing with budgets and studios and practicals. Is there a reason it took you this long to get to the format of television? I feel like because of a desire to, you know, execute a vision in full. Yeah. It's been known, I think maybe post Sopranos that this is really

the form, this is the venue for doing this. No question. I'll tell you exactly what it was. I'm not necessarily neurologically built for an ongoing open-ended narrative. I really am kind of a closed narrative sort of person. So until this format became available where you could close things, it just seemed, I don't know, like something I wouldn't necessarily want to do. It's not that I couldn't. I just, I like to know how things end. It's really important to me. That said, now there are interesting, I'm watching series and I see how they function. And, you know, Alec Berg's a good friend of mine and he does Silicon Valley and he does

Barry. And I watch in particular the way Alec does these things on those two shows, the season does, it is close ended. It will begin again. The cycle begins again, right? But it's an arc and the arc closes. It closes. You feel at the end of a season that if they never came back, the show would have ended. And I really like that. I'm much more about that than I am about a kind of ongoing soap opera or a procedural kind of thing where each episode is sort of like a here we go again, you know? One of the most fascinating material parts of this series to me is the fact that there's this extraordinary attention to detail and replicating

period moments, but there's also necessary choices that are made to create composite characters, to slightly manipulate some of the circumstances to make it legible to the audience. What was the hardest thing to do when you were writing this? Certainly every time I felt a need to deviate from the historical record, I felt it. Because I am very much committed to accuracy and so much of the show is about the danger of narrative. It's why I do this other podcast, this companion piece with Peter Sagal, where I account for these things and explain them. I just thought it was really important. And I told HBO that I was going to do that before I ever wrote a script.

What was the response to that? I was curious. They were into it. They liked it. Yeah, they were totally into it. I think that they were like? I was curious. They were into it. They liked it. Yeah, they were totally into it. I think that they were like, okay, well, you know, sure. Podcast sounds fine.

Okay. What they didn't say and what I was really grateful for was, oh yeah, no, because if you tell people that that didn't really happen, you're kind of undermining your show. They didn't say that. They got it on the first bounce that it actually accentuates. I think now that they've seen that podcast is remarkably popular. I mean, millions of people are listening to the podcast and now they're like, oh, this podcast thing makes sense. This is good. We like this. I know they're going to be encroaching on our territory. It's a bit of a dicey proposition

because I mean, you're obviously an experienced podcaster, but someone like you coming in and saying, actually, I know what the perfect compliment to this thing I've created is, is a fascinating thing. It feels like it's the new director's commentary track. A little bit. Yeah. You're sort of saying rather than being in your ear while you look at things and describing what it was like on the day or why you picked that clothing, you're talking about the material. You're having a grown up, honest discussion with the audience. And look, I hope it does start a trend. But every time I had to deviate, I had to justify to myself and I had to really ask why. And there were certain times where I thought, you know, life would be a lot easier if I weren't

fussy about this because there's two versions of this event and version A is mind-blowingly dramatic and version B is dramatic. And in those cases, I went with version B because I just didn't feel, it just felt like cheating. Was it to be safe? Like, what was the impulse there? No, it was to be respectful. The things that happened at Chernobyl that were shocking and horrifying and true are shocking and horrifying enough that to gild the lily or push any kind of – just push things where they shouldn't be pushed, to me, was sort of disrespectful to the true aspect of the things that really were unbelievable and crazy. And it would just call into question the intent of all of this. So I really tried hard to limit those changes to things that had to be, or else I couldn't

tell the story. I mean, we're coming up on the final episode. Um, I don't know when this discussion right after it airs, there you go. So people have seen the final episode now um and i talk about this in our podcast that our main three characters um lagasov and shabina and komyuk were not at that trial komyuk is a composite character anyway um but if i show the people who were at that trial who were dealing with very similar circumstances nobody would know who they were uh and i don't, nobody would know who they were. And I don't think anybody would necessarily care. So these are things you must sort of allow for in narrativizing an event, but you try

and stay within the realm of what was proper intention and the things that they relay are true. And, and we do get to see back in the control room and all of that stuff is, is really close to, to, to the historical record, including a repetition of, of some actual lines. Like when Dyatlov says, I wasn't even there when they raised the power, I was in the toilet. That's a line that somebody recorded down who witnessed the trial. Dyatlov said that. It's incredible. I'm fascinated by the amount of research that you've done for this. I heard you say that Voices of Chernobyl was profoundly important to putting this together

and inspiring, but what else do you do? Everything. I mean, anything that crossed my path that was about Chernobyl, at least I would audition it. Sometimes you would look at some things and go, right, well, this doesn't seem quite useful to me because it's either going over some stuff or it feels a little uh less informed than a similar but i was looking at scientific reports i was looking at historical books written by soviet ex-soviet physicists who were there i was looking at books that were western historians in that point of view, documentaries, transcripts, first-person accounts, every possible thing. I told my wife last night that you were coming in and she said, did he go to Chernobyl? Did he actually go?

Of course I did. How could I not? So what was that experience like? It was, I'm not a religious person, but that was close. Like I felt something there. I had been living with it in my head for so long and getting there was so surreal for me because it was as if I were returning to a place. I know that place. I know Pripyat. I know the street. I know that there's the Polissi Hotel. I know that there's the party headquarters. And I know there's the sports stand where they had started to construct. And I know these things. And there they are.

It was remarkable. Is it extremely difficult to get the tour, I presume, you got? It's not extremely difficult. There's a certain built-in difficulty to get the tour I presume you got? It's not extremely difficult. There's a certain built-in difficulty to visiting the zone. You have to make sure that you're on a list and they collect your passport. When you enter the zone, they check your radiation. They want to make sure anyone comes in with radiation and they definitely check you on the way out. And they've got your passport.

So when you're in the zone, you're in the zone. But they have a number of good tour guides. The tour guides that took us through were there at the time. They grew up in Pripyat. Oh, wow. We were looking at the supermarket, the empty food market. And one of our tour guides was just describing how he would go there with his mom. And so that part of it was fascinating.

And then the plant itself, they do have tours. And we were able to get pretty close to the control room of reactor four. We got to as far as the pump room of reactor three. It's pretty close. Definitely the dosimeter was pinging on that one. Yeah. Let me ask you a question with all due respect. Yeah. Let me ask you a question with all due respect. Yeah.

Do you understand science? Because I think that the single greatest feat of the series, as emotionally stirring as it is, as physically upsetting as it is, as intellectually thoughtful as it is, is the way that it very legibly explains what happened. Yeah. That feels like a real feat. And how did you do that? I do understand science. Okay, that's helpful. But in a sophisticated fashion,

I guess is really more my question. Well, I was, you know, I was, I've always been a scientifically inclined person. I was pre-med in college until I decided that I would rather, you know, write things for a living. This is starting to make sense. Yeah. And so I've always been,

I've always been, I went to a medical science magnet high school. I mean here we go so so i'm there i'm the big science dork for sure um but the very first um sort of uh i guess i would call it individual bit of research i did where i was one-on-one with somebody was uh at usc i just i went through there's um an organization that basically connects people in the entertainment industry with scientists. They connected me with this wonderful guy named Professor Isaac Maya at USC. He's a nuclear physicist. And he sat down with me for a good hour and he explained how nuclear reactors work. And he explained how

the Chernobyl reactor worked and some of the problems there. And I learned things that day that were fascinating to me because they were counterintuitive. Like you have to slow neutrons down in order to make reactivity go up. And then from that, I just kept reading and reading and reading. And then there were some other nuclear physicists I would consult when I would ask pesky questions all the time. But the important thing for me was I needed to understand it well enough that I could explain it to people who were not going to sit down with nuclear physicists and who do not have scientific backgrounds. I needed to make it clear.

And I needed to make it compelling because I think science, when you boil it down, is absolutely compelling. It's the big plot of explication of what has happened, you know? And so there are millions of proxies and there's one man with information, which is just such a smart formulation for telling the story. Well, and listen, that's kind of how it is in life for all scientists. I mean, he does have, obviously the character that Emily Watson plays is right there with him. And so they do have these fascinating little shorthands. And I like that they wouldn't explain things. He says, I'm working on a plan. She says, heat exchanger, I presume.

And he goes, mm-hmm. It doesn't matter if you know what that is. You just know that they know and that feels okay. But yes, in any situation where something has gone wrong and there is science to explain what went wrong and science to explain what to do next, a scientist is going to have to explain it to people who are not scientists. And I love the fact that even in the Soviet Union, where people were questioned and their, I don't know, use was questioned all the time, there's a respect there. At some point you say, we have to listen to scientists.

It would be nice if we had that a little bit more here right now today in our country. Well, it's a very nice segue to my next question, which is this was conceived pre-election, 16. Yes, conceived pre-16, but the scripts were written during 2016. I mean, truth and lies being a fundamental theme of the story. Did it radically shift the way that you positioned anything in the way that you told it? Given that it's docudrama, I wonder how much you can Trojan horse in certain ideas that you're interested in. putting aside the result of the election, didn't really matter how the election turned out, the nature of the election and the things that were happening where disinformation was suddenly becoming celebrated

and narrative was being weaponized and truth was being debased. It is an extension of a process that's been going on for a long time where our politics are really now just ad campaigns and humans are brands and i find it all deeply discouraging you know i i think that there's we all have our feelings about the issues and things but all the politics in this country have become brandized and marketized.

You know, it's like, I don't know how somebody like Harry Truman could possibly run or get elected today, which is sad. Um, by the way, Abraham Lincoln would have zero chance, zero, just based on his appearance, no chance. Uh, and his voice, not a brand, not, not good campaign, not a good ad campaign. So, um, that was really in the forefront of my mind. I wanted to be able to say to an American audience and a British audience, this is not, uh, there, a lot of this is very specifically Soviet, but a lot of this is human. It's not like Soviets turned humans into Soviets. Humans turned themselves into Soviets. It is within us, this capacity for this. And so I'm hoping that

people do derive a lesson from that and notice that there was a point in time where Chernobyl was pre-explosion and post-explosion. And we are all of us living on a planet that I think is pre- explosion. What do we do? Do we do something about it now or do we just run around post-explosion? That's very upsetting. Yeah, that's what I do. Let me make it somewhat lighter. I'm fascinated by the way that things like this become grist for some of the brand mill that you're talking about. And one of the things that has emerged is that people are having a lot of fun with the accents yes and the fact that no one is speaking with a russian accent or in russian in this film yeah uh what what do you make of that are you aware of it are you consuming it i know there there are specific narrative reasons you've chosen to cast primarily english actors yes but what happens

when something like that becomes a part of the larger consumption narrative? I've been really pleased. I mean, when the first episode aired, there was a lot of, I would say, maybe like 5% to 10% of the reactions I was seeing were, this is great, but why are these people speaking British? Or, you know, there's like, you know how in the internet,

everyone makes the one joke. They think they're so funny. Like, I didn't know that British people lived in the South. Okay. That has essentially disappeared as time has gone on, which it should have. It's supposed to fall away and disappear. And it's not a thing.

It obviously hasn't negatively impacted the viewership or people's connection to the show. And I like to think, look, there's a parallel universe where we made the show and we did decide, let's have everybody talk in a Russian accent. And in that universe, we're getting killed. We're getting killed because our show is full of stupid, fake accents. We're getting killed and deservedly so. Did you ever consider it? Oh, of course. Yeah.

Of course. There were all sorts of theories. The first theory I had was let's not do broad Russian accents. Let's just do slightly vaguely Eastern European. Like Bond villain.

Yeah, just a slightly sort of thing where instead of talking like I normally do, I would talk like this. Yeah. Great. Here's the problem. Like Brighton Beach. Yeah. Just a slightly sort of thing where instead of talking like I normally do, I would talk like this. Yeah. Great. Here's the problem.

Like Brighton beach. Yeah. Vaguely Brighton beach. Yeah. Uh, where my grandparents lived and my father taught high school. No kidding. Maybe that's what I recognize.

Yeah. Um, good old Brighton beach. Yeah. Uh, what we found out very quickly was that there are some actors for whom this is second nature and they're brilliant at it. And it's actually part of their process and they're lovely, but we had a hundred and speaking

parts and a lot of them, it's not normal for them. Uh, and you're just going to get this bizarre hodgepodge. I mean, you're just going to, it's just going to sound like everyone's trying to do something. And most of them are just missing the mark. More importantly, everyone starts to act the accent. And the last thing in the world I'm interested in is somebody doing something beautiful that makes me feel something, but their accent was wrong. This is ultimately about people. Nobody in the Soviet Union spoke Russian-accented English. They spoke Russian. So why don't we just dispense with that and just allow actors to portray the truth of being human

with each other? And I think we made the right decision. 100%. Zero regrets on that one. I think the reception has, has borne that decision out is correct. Did anyone try to slip Boris and Natasha in there at all? Is there any, we, we did, uh,

uh, Nina gold and Rob Stern who are casting, uh, directors. Um, they made sure everybody knew coming in. Just don't, you know,

if you have a really strong regional accent, maybe shave a little bit of it off, you know, just push it a little bit towards the middle, but otherwise, but do not do any fake Russian accents. One guy came in and he was just like, nah, I'm doing it. I'll show you. And that man was Tom Cruise. And that man was, and we were torn at that point. No, I don't remember exactly what the guy's name was. I just remember thinking, you know what? Hats off, man.

Good for you. You know, you had a plan. It didn't work. It did not work. It was never going to work. But I like that you just stuck, you stuck to your guns, you know? Some chutzpah. Yeah, yeah.

So what happens now for you? You came in and you said, I have to write. I have an assignment of some kind. Yes. I always have assignments of some kind yes but i always have assignments of some kind um is is is all of your work going to be in television now is it going to radically change what kind of a career you have yeah yeah no it already has i mean i'm i'm i intend to stay with this and make more television shows like this for hbo um, I mean, I still will do work in features, but it's, you know, more of a help out, do

a week, do two weeks, you know, that kind of thing here or there. But my main focus at this point is to, is to do more work in this space. And I do have a project that I'm going to start digging into in about a month that is set up at HBO. And it's very serious, and it's another limited series, but it's far from the time and place of Chernobyl. A lot closer to home, is what I'll say. Interesting. Brighton Beach, the miniseries. It's not Brighton Beach Memoirs. Although I do love Brighton Beach. I was having lunch with an executive at

HBO six, nine months, I don't remember how long ago, before Chernobyl was really on people's radar. And he said, this is a big thing. This is a big deal. This is very good. Oh my. And I was like, I don't know what this is. I know Craig's name from this. This doesn't make sense. Was there

ever, and also it was explained that it was going to be on Mondays. Right. And I was like, huh. On the very popular viewing night of Monday. I was like, that doesn't sound right at all. That's what I'm really proud of. Like, you know, we're doing,

we're pulling some pretty great numbers. We're pulling great numbers and it goes up each week and it's on a night that is not a thing, right? But HBO is expanding what they're, so we're kind of, we're the vanguard. That was the conversation. Yeah, we're sort of the vanguard of Monday nights. They said, we're going to try it with this show.

We think it's going to work. And it did. It has. It has. Was there ever, I mean, how much are you involved in things like that when you're, since you're in this sort of showrunner capacity? Do you have a say? Do they tell you and you say, oh God, that's disappointing?

Or, you know, what is that like? I mean, I trust them on that stuff. They consult me on all aspects of these things. I think there, when it comes to certain creative things, like what should the poster be for Chernobyl? And that, it really is, listen, we want you to be involved in this and we're not putting a poster out you don't like. They're amazing that way. When it comes to these big business decisions, like what time and what day, this is their gig. They're pretty good at it. HBO does pretty well with that stuff. I'm not really going to yell or shout about that. Look, I also know what night is sort of irrelevant. I mean, listen, if it were, again, if it were six, seven years ago, it would have been a

lot. Um, but I got the benefit of promos for Chernobyl running on their version of the Superbowl, right? I mean, these massive numbers for Game of Thrones, what else can I be but grateful, you know, both to Game of Thrones and to HBO for getting people to know it's there. And then they watch it. They've been watching it on Monday night though. That's, that's, that's the really cool part is that they've been showing up more and more to actually tune in right when it starts at 9 PM East coast time on Monday night. I think that's amazing.

Now, the next thing you do also has to be on Monday nights. I guess I'm the Monday night guy. Yeah. Sure. Uh, you know, usually I have filmmakers on this show. Yep. I almost never do shows about TV. I love this so much. And it felt very filmic in a way, uh, that I wanted to talk about it. And I end every episode by asking filmmakers, what's the last great thing they've seen. I know you are a, as smart a person as there is about the mechanics and the making of things in this industry. So what is something that you saw recently that you were like, there's something ingenious about this?

There's not going to be any news here, but I started watching Fleabag. My wife turned me on to it. And so I started watching it and she's doing, you know what I love about it more than anything is that no one else in the world could do it. I think that's where this is going. I think everything that we are going to fall in love with will be fingerprinted. Fingerprinted. It used to be that that was a problem and that as an industry, we would push things toward a more homogenized middle. Did you ever hear, I don't know if you ever read the article many years ago

that Malcolm Gladwell did about mustard and ketchup and tomato sauce? And I always loved that, that the guy came to Prego and said, here's what you do. You don't change your Prego. You release seven different Pregos. That's where we are now. We used to just go, okay, the point of this movie is it's got to taste a bit like ragu. And now it's like, nah. And what she's doing is not only fingerprinted, but I don't think anybody

could ever do anything like it. And I love that. I just think that's amazing. I mean, and as much as I can try and adhere to my own fingerprint on these things that I do in the same kind of vein as Chernobyl, I will, because I think that's what people want now. And I love that. But yeah, I mean, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, she's, Fleabag is amazing. Perfect answer. Craig, thanks so much for doing this. Thank you, sir. Thank you again to Craig Mazin and Mallory Rubin. Please stay tuned to The Big Picture later this week.

My pal and I, Chris Ryan, will be breaking down the new film Dark Phoenix, the theoretically final installment in the X-Men saga. We're also going to be talking about basically everything the X-Men movies have been doing and have done for moviegoing in the last 20 years. So stick around, see you on Friday.