HBO’s terrific five-episode miniseries Chernobyl has two big surprises up its sleeve.
The first is just how compelling and watchable it is, despite being what amounts to an incredibly grim horror story about the people who sacrificed their lives after a reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded in 1986, so that the situation wouldn’t grow even worse. It is matter-of-fact about the sheer scale of the pain and trauma these people experienced, and what had to be done to ultimately save the world.
The second is that the man behind it is Craig Mazin, whose most notable credits prior to Chernobyl were … the two sequels to the 2009 hit comedy The Hangover. Even setting aside the fact that Hollywood writers often have to work on wildly different projects to stay employed, there’s still a pretty big gap between Chernobyl and the Hangover movies!
But people who’ve listened to Mazin’s terrific screenwriting podcast, Scriptnotes, which he co-hosts with fellow…
