I watched all the episodes so far in one sitting yesterday evening. Pretty riveting television...well-produced, well-scripted and very well-acted. But I also got rather annoyed, as it is a work of almost complete fiction masquerading as an accurate historical account.
Clearly it was a catastrophic accident - but in reality the situation was never even remotely as apocalyptic as presented in the film...
There was never the any risk of a multi-megaton 'thermal' explosion that would have wiped out the entire western third of the USSR. There was a risk of a thermal explosion, but the concern was that it would kill and injure the people trying to contain the damaged reactor or that it would damage the other three reactors on the site.
The civilian population in Pripyat did not get severe radiation burns from gawking at the burning reactor...in fact it seems that these people had absolutely no immediate health effects (despite media reports to the contrary), and the long term health effects (thyroid cancer etc.) seem to have be much lower than anyone expected at the time. The only people who suffered severe radiation burns or acute radiation sickness were the staff for that specific reactor and the (very brave) people who were directly involved in the containment or cleanup.
The three (genuinely heroic) men who waded underneath the reactor building to help drain the water storage tanks were not on a suicide mission. Two are still alive, and the third died of natural causes (a heart attack).
There were no miners...in reality they used oil drilling technology to pump liquid nitrogen under the reactor, but then realized it was unnecessary and stopped the effort. Even if the core had melted through the the concrete base it would not have rendered the entire Dnieper watershed uninhabitable.
Finally, the other three reactors on the site were undamaged - once Reactor 4 was contained they continued to be operated (although the operators had to work limited shifts), and the entire site was only decommissioned in 2000.
I'm afraid I find it rather ironic that so much of the discussion in the media on this series consists of sanctimonious homilies on the terrible consequences of the communist system suppressing the truth, when the series itself contains so many deliberate and misleading untruths as to almost represent propaganda. False news indeed!