2019 Award-Winning Drama Was Ranked No. 1 Miniseries This Decade-and You Can Binge It in a Day

Collider recently ranked the "10 Best Miniseries From the Last 10 Years," which is an excellent resource for anyone looking to binge-watch a new show in a single day. Making the list are hits like The Queen's Gambit, The Haunting of Hill House, and Adolescence-but coming in at number one is Chernobyl.

This 2019 historical drama, which was produced by HBO, is about the 1986 nuclear plant disaster. It depicts the firefighters who responded to the scene and teams of miners who dug a tunnel under Reactor 4, as well as the cleanup efforts that followed the tragedy.

The five-part series received 19 Emmy nominations, winning three categories. The show also won several Golden Globes and BAFTAs. It is well-regarded by fans too, with a 97% audience score onRotten Tomatoesand a 95% critic score.

The show was created by Craig Mazin, who is known for his other popular HBO series, The Last of Us. In an interview with Vice, he spoke about how he originally came up with the idea to make a series about the Chernobyl disaster.

"Because I was 15 when Chernobyl happened, I've been vaguely thinking about it for most of my life," he said. "But somewhere around 2015, it occurred to me that I didn't know how it happened, which seemed like a pretty bizarre lapse in my understanding of the world and how it functions. So I just started reading. I honestly just wanted to know, from a scientific point of view, what exactly went wrong that night."

Mazin continued, "What I discovered as I kept reading was something that was shocking, and remarkable, and kept coming at you. It was a little bit like I had discovered a war that no one had really written thoroughly about. And then, of course, I found out that people had-it's just that it hadn't crossed over into everyone's consciousness. And I became obsessed."

Related: 1962 ‘The Twilight Zone' Episode Was Ranked as Having the Best Plot Twist in the Entire Series

Mazin explained that it took about "two and a half years of research and preparing and structuring" before he sat down to write the scripts for the series. Although it is mostly based on true events, there are a few changes he made throughout the story. "We had a basic rule of thumb: If you had to change something to be able to tell the story, narratively, then that was the only reason we could change it," he said. "We couldn't change things to make them scarier; we couldn't change things to make them more dramatic, or more sensational, or more horrifying."

Chernobyl is currently streaming on HBO Max.

Copyright 2026 The Arena Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved

This story was originally published April 28, 2026 at 11:15 AM.