How a miniseries on a catastrophic disaster touched heartstrings through the simple elements of storytelling

How Chernobyl won the hearts of the viewers, boils down to the basic fact in storytelling: Show, don’t tell.

The series starts with a scene leading to the suicide of Valery Legasov played by Jared Harris. Legasov ponders over some poignant questions, states certain cryptic facts, stacks up his recorded cassettes, hoard them and leaves a plate of food for his cat. While the camera centres on the cat licking away his plate of food, the creaking noises hint the viewers of something ominous happening in the background. The fallen spectacles and the shining leather shoes hanging midair is all that’s shown in the preceding scene. But the viewers already know.
The series is stitched together with scenes of minimal yet well-scripted dialogues, intense background music and brilliant direction. The masterminds behind the series opted for a different way of storytelling. Unlike in most tv series where the suspense is build up in a linear direction, Chernobyl started at the cusp of the disaster. It then proceeded to show how everything went downhill after that: the pandemonium, the panic, the general confusion and most of all the blatant ignorance that cost thousands their lives.
The scene where the residents watch the fire, over the bridge, is an innocent scene but yet we know deep in our mind that this will not end in a good way. At the end of the series, we find out that no one from the bridge had survived, and it was later called the Bridge of Death. Subtle scenes like when the bird fell out from the sky into the pavement add more layers to the beauty of storytelling without showing anything obvious.
But the episode that possibly translated the mental anguish people underwent would have to be the 4th episode. It showcased a young man, with no prior experience recruited into the military to clean up the aftereffects of the disaster. He has to kill innocent animals, some of which come running towards him with love. He cannot eat after his first kill. The conversation that ensues between him and his colleagues are harrowing
“You are not you anymore. You will never be you anymore. But then you wake up the next morning and you are still you. And you realise that was you all along. You just didn't know.”
Lyudmilla Ignatenko, the wife of the firefighter Vasily Ignatenko had lost her new born baby to radiation. But instead of just stating this, the writers went on to show the pain of the mother. The camera panning through a ward of crying infants and mothers hushing them to sleep, ends with a deserted crib, and a completely broken Lyudmilla. No dialogues, no special effects. Just brilliant direction and cinematography.
Dialogues and scenes like these have played an important role in translating the disaster into simple human terms. Just showcasing the disaster itself will not make the viewers empathise with the story. The secret lies in bringing to screen the struggles and mental anguish common people went through. And when you do it through perfectly executed camera movements, frames and well-scripted direction, you get a series like Chernobyl.