Chernobyl - HBO Series

I recently had the opportunity to catch a series on HBO. No it's not Game Of Thrones! :) On a side-node, I haven't seen a single episode of GoT and don't intend to, especially after everyone lambasted how bad the series was.

Anyway, back to the point. The series I watched was Chernobyl. I remember being in high school when I first heard about Chernobyl. I remember spending hours reading about it online in the slow dialup connection that I possessed at that time. It was a disaster that was unprecedented. I remember reading about the "Elephant Foot" and wondering what the radiation levels would be today. Well, this was about 15 years ago.

Fast forward and now we have a miniseries on HBO about Chernobyl. This is probably one of the best docuseries' I've ever seen. The narration was to the point, the sound wasn't too jarring and to the point, visuals were stunning, story telling was brilliant and most importantly, casting was spectacular. A lot of the scenes were faithfully recreated by the team including the trial. Anyone who isn't intimately familiar with the turn of events would definitely have a nice understanding of the incident. And the science was explained in a brilliant and unique way in the trial in episode 5.

Which begs the question - how deviant is it from real life?

For which, I recommend listening to the 5 part podcast where director Craig Mazin explains where he took his license to introduce some dramatization. While there are some differences, I felt the overall intention was spot on and the series was made in an effort to pay tribute to the thousands of souls who sacrificed their lives.

I began to think about something else as I finished the series. Our current generation has many many luxuries when compared to 30 years ago. The fact that one can even decide to watch a series like Chernobyl and almost immediately stream it to one's heart's content is mindblowing. Tell this to someone who lived in the mid 1980s and they'd laugh at you. Technology has transformed all our lives and it's on the path to usher us in even more comfort.

But what has comfort really given us?

Have our senses really improved? Have we become more hardworking? Are we capable of reading books faster? Or are we capable of retaining more information?