This was an extended post-Chernobyl joke about callous corporations borne of the ‘90s zeitgeist, but thanks to the longevity of The Simpsons, it’s still going today. On TV, meanwhile, radiation’s most prominent representation was on The Simpsons, in its full glowing-green cartoon form. As the cinema A-list has it, it’s usually James Bond waving a rod of plutonium about in a way that would probably render him infertile. Even this is an outlier in terms of taking the subject seriously. The last serious drama to use nuclear power as a central plot device was The China Syndrome, all the way back in 1979, and despite some rave reviews at the time it was obviously helped by the Three Mile Island accident happening less than two weeks after its release. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land, written in 1922, included the line ‘I will show you fear in a handful of dust’ – sixty years later, it came horrifyingly true. Despite the scene where we behold the ghostly sight of the exploded reactor core, it’s the grit and debris that’s actually killing people. The true threat, as becomes all too clear very quickly, isn’t the fire itself, but rather, the unassuming lump of graphite on the ground. Indeed, the fire sequence in the first episode is something of a red herring. The Chernobyl miniseries had plenty of spectacle, but that’s not something inherent to radiation. Beyond that, it largely serves in comic book adaptations as a magic bullet, a way of explaining where superheroes got their powers on par with ‘a wizard did it’. Everyone knows Titanic, and cinema in the ‘70s saw so many aeroplanes in peril that it kicked off Leslie Nielsen’s career as a deadpan comic marvel in the 1980 spoof Airplane!.īut the funny thing is that radiation, by contrast, has never seen all that much screentime – practically none if you discount nuclear weapons being used as MacGuffins in rough, tough action films. (1974’s The Towering Inferno was essentially Die Hard with a fire instead of terrorists.) Ditto things going wrong with ships and planes. Earthquakes, volcanoes, and meteors, your big, beefy disasters, are ready-made examples of the kind of spectacle the flicks love. The genre has a long history, and favours some sorts of disasters more than others. Narratives focused on a disaster have, until now, been a preserve of the cinema, and haven’t really been done on the small screen. Whereas HBO’s previous best-shows-ever The Sopranos and The Wire have been crime dramas, their miniseries Chernobyl is clearly of the awkwardly named ‘ disaster movie’ genre.
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