Chernobyl

· Key Elements
Chernobyl is a show aired in HBO, an US platform, during May 2019. It consisted of an
only season of 5 episodes, each of around 1 hour long. Its format is to be considered a
Miniseries – Docufiction, since it relates real facts of Chernobyl disaster occurred in 1986.
It was scheduled on a weekly basis, with a new episode coming up on Mondays. Its target
audience could be considered to be the all-important 18-49 group, that tend to consume
mainstream media. It is also worth to consider that play only had one screenwriter, Craig
Mazin.

· How is content encoded into and decoded as meaningful discourse?

From the real disaster of Chernobyl, Craig Mazin takes that framework of knowledge and
modifies it to create a story appealing to TV, thus, through the different technical
infrastructures and relations of productions, the content is encoded into a meaningful
discourse that the audience, later, after circulation and use, interprets into different
decodings corresponding to Stuart Hall theories. These decodings are not simply
transmitted but created by the audience the moment they read the discourse.

· Audience Responses
Generally, Chernobyl was welcomed and well-regarded by the general public, even by
Russian society, that considered the series to be a very well executed homage to the
different firefighters, soldiers and people that worked during the disaster. We could argue
that the dominant-hegemonic code held by the entertainment industry and its
interpretation by the public is the perception of the series as some sort of paying respect
and not forgetting about such a disaster. The message they wanted to transmit, and the
majority of the public received was of the telling a crude story that was once forgotten.

On the other hand, we find different opinions on this topic, with different viewers stating
that this is not an homage of any class, but a criticism to Russian agenda and the different
statements of it, with no historical rigor. There was no difference on this position on
western and eastern viewers.

We find examples of this by American critic Williams Schwartz, that says: “That
methodological approach gives the HBO Chernobyl series a distinct impression of
truthiness, despite the series having long been known to be riddled with factual errors,
almost all of which were unsubtly designed to make the Soviet government look bad”.
So, the oppositional position sees the discourse as political criticism.

Negotiated position is seen as audience that does consider the work of great quality and
sees it very well narrated from a respectable point of view, but, at the same time, they do
not consider proper to tell a “made-up story”. That is to say, introducing unrealistic facts
that alter the historical rigor is completely out of place. A user from RottenTomatoes says
the following: “It's so compelling until you learn that the filmmakers made up about 35%
of this. Stop lying to people! Just tell us what really happened!”

Summarising, Chernobyl is a highly rated show that received different postures from the
audience according to Stuart Hall theories, that differ from the originally proposed one.