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HBO's Chernobyl may yet become the highest rated TV Show ever
- KyleOS 7y agoCredit to Siddharth Shukla - used his script to get the IMDB ratings (https://github.com/sid8491/imdb-tv-shows-rating https://github.com/sid8491/imdb-tv-shows-rating).
- spork12 7y agoThis was an awesome show. It was easy to miss with GoT just ending on HBO. I only wish it was more than 6 episodes.
- untog 7y ago*highest IMDB rated IMDB ratings are of pretty dubious quality. They also fall victim to a recency bias - looking at their Top 250 list, Avengers Endgame is currently listed as the number nine best film ever made, which... come on.
- tpm 7y agoIt's also currently second highest rated series on csfd (czech and slovak movie db) which makes it less likely that the ratings are gamed or otherwise dubious.
- notus 7y agoIt might also be worth pointing out that the majority of IMDB raters are males in their 30's so it is going to be heavily biased towards what appeals to males in their 30's. I think there is a lot of overlap between what different genders and age groups enjoys still but it still shows a pretty clear bias. You can filter the ratings down by gender or age group to get a better impression.
- signal11 7y agoThey are also subject to brigading[1], although the movie in question has recovered a bit[2]. [1] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-story-behind-the-worst-movie-on- https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-story-behind-the-wo... [2] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2574698/ratings https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2574698/ratings
- myroon5 7y agofirst link missing the last part: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-story-behind-the-worst-movie-on-imdb/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-story-behind-the-wo...
- KyleOS 7y agoI don't know if that is down to recency bias, but rather the sheer number of fans for that particular genre. There are not many movies in the top 50 you could reasonably make that same argument for. Also, I'm not sure you could make that argument for IMDB's top 250 TV series [1], but maybe that's just my own preferences speaking. [1] https://www.imdb.com/chart/toptv/ https://www.imdb.com/chart/toptv/
- dmurray 7y agoThree of the top ten aired in 2019, and all ten aired this century. I think it's fair to say we are in a golden age of TV series, but it's also just that TV shows don't age as well as film, which causes a recency bias.
- ssully 7y agoIncredibly dubious. I have found user ratings for things that draw 'passionate' fan bases (movies, video games, etc) to be nearly useless over the last 3 to 5 years. Review bombings are becoming all too common over issues that more often then not have nothing to do with the actual product. Luckily, I haven't really seen this with books yet (at least on Goodreads), but I am sure it has just as much potential to be hit in a similar way.
- ameister14 7y agoGoodreads ratings are massively dubious to the point of almost uselessness, frankly.
- ssully 7y agoLuckily I haven't had a bad experience yet. I've found some reviews to be a little more positive then I would expect, but I would take people being overly generous then the review cesspools I have stumbled upon on Steam or IMBD/Rotten Tomatoes.
- ameister14 7y agoI've seen a pretty good amount of brigading on Goodreads, especially on less known books
- avip 7y agoAnd what is good, Phaedrus, and what is not good — need we ask anyone to tell us these things? Yes Socrates, let's consult the mob.
- jimmaswell 7y agoI disagree with review consensus so often they might as well be white noise to me.
- pledg 7y agoAlso comparing a mini-series of 5 episodes against multi-year of 60+
- oh_sigh 7y agoThere is also a...non-recency bias in other rankings like AFI, where movies from the 50s and 60s are way overrepresented in the standings. Was "some like it hot" really the funniest movie of all time?
- zepearl 7y agoAgree. I usually use http://themoviedb.org http://themoviedb.org to have an at least slightly more reliable idea of how a film is - not perfect but I can usually get an idea if I compare the rating of the candidate movie against other films which I liked and disliked in the past. P.S.: the guys of tmdb have (or at least they used to have) as well a nice API to download stuff (ratings, posters/images, etc... if I remember correctly when I programmed a simple media player looong time back). Edit - link to API docs: https://developers.themoviedb.org/3/getting-started/introduction https://developers.themoviedb.org/3/getting-started/introduc...
- minimaxir 7y agoHere's a heatmap distribution of IMDB rankings of movies by the year they were released: https://minimaxir.com/img/imdb-data-analysis/imdb-4.png https://minimaxir.com/img/imdb-data-analysis/imdb-4.png It's less of a recency bias (the trend is mostly flat by year of movie release), but both ends of the spectrum are more extreme for movies in the last decade.
- cm2187 7y agoIt would be more interesting to follow the evolution day by day of the rating from release date to until it stabilizes after a year or two.
- minimaxir 7y agoIf data snapshots exist for IMDb data (that do not involve scraping the website/archives of the website), I'm open to that.
- cm2187 7y agoNo need to scrap, you can download most of their db, including ratings. But you need to start doing this every few days to start building a history: https://datasets.imdbws.com/ https://datasets.imdbws.com/
- cm2187 7y agoI think the ratings are clearly manipulated. All new releases somehow start with stellar ratings before sinking in after a few months. That being said I was about to complain that Chernobyl didn't deal with the most interesting part, how the explosion happened in the first place, but the last episode did exactly that. I agree that it is an excellent mini-series. Though the explantion in the tv show pretty much mirror the wikipedia article.
- Sukotto 7y agoPersonally, my "go to" list for movie rankings is http://www.phi-phenomenon.org/ http://www.phi-phenomenon.org/ which is a labor of love project attempting to generate a forced ranking of all-time best movies. The main downside of it is that it discounts recent (past 5+ years) movies. This is partly due to the infrequent updates, and partly because films take a while to appear in the data sources the site uses for its statistical analysis. (I am not affiliated with that site. I'm just a long-time, satisfied user of it)
- skinnymuch 7y agoThe list seems to be a consensus popularity contest, right? The only top 50 movies from this century are LOTR films for example. While the 90s films, half are cult films that became massively hyped or Oscar films.
- oliwarner 7y agoThese are self-selected audience scores. No more dubious than a single critic review, just different. Endgame is the final piece in a 22-film story arc. The people paying to watch it in the cinema, reviewing it are already fans before they've seen it. It won't be until home release where more moderate voices step in. I'm not sure you can really level the same claims against Chernobyl though. These are people who had an HBO subscription, and that really only suggests they like Game of Thrones. You can also argue these sorts of willing-audience reviews are actually a good thing, if you align with the reviewing audience. IMDb does make basic demographics available on their reviews.
- thedudeabides5 7y agoThis show is so good, and parrallels to China are interesting.
- kitten_smuggler 7y agoLoved the show but felt that it was a bit heavy on the fear-mongering. EDIT* What I mean by this is that the facts were dramatized for effect, at a time when we need to change societal opinions on nuclear more than ever.
- beiller 7y agoI almost agree with you. But I think it was fair fear-mongering on both sides (the scientists vs the politicians). It really drove home that secrets and cover-ups were the real disaster. People were afraid to admit their failure. I like to think that today, with cameras and social media everywhere, secrets and cover-ups about a disaster like this would be even more impossible (it was impossible to cover up even then).
- smacktoward 7y agoI found this interview with the showrunner to be thought-provoking in that regard: https://slate.com/culture/2019/06/chernobyl-finale-hbo-miniseries-craig-mazin-interview.html https://slate.com/culture/2019/06/chernobyl-finale-hbo-minis... > For a million reasons, this was not an anti-nuclear polemic. It’s anti–Soviet government, and it is anti-lie, and it is pro–human being. But anyone who thinks the point of this is that nuclear power is bad, is just, they’ve just missed it.
- izzydata 7y agoThank you for that quote. I was going to try and write something along those lines, but that seems like a better summary. Anti-nuclear energy simply wasn't part of the narrative. It only seems like that because the events of Chernobyl really happened. They pointed out a few times that the only reason the Chernobyl catastrophe happened was because of all the corners that were cut and the lies that were told. Other nations with Nuclear programs weren't likely to have the same problem because they were more open.
- smacktoward 7y agoMazin addresses this point in another good interview, this one with Vox: https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/6/4/18647339/chernobyl-finale-hbo-truth-how-accurate https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/6/4/18647339/chernobyl-fina... > It’s the story of the Soviet Union, but the danger is you make the story about how the Soviets were a bunch of liars and it’s easy for America — and some Americans continue to do this, remarkably — to say, “See? Those Soviets ... they’re liars.” And it became clear to me that Soviets are just people, and we’re just people, and lying is not in the water over there. It’s something people do. And they do it here. The Soviet system is a warning: Don’t take it this far. Please, for the love of god, don’t take it this far.
- ds 7y agoIts good, but I think its easier to be good for 6 episodes than it is for multiple seasons. Even if you disregard that- Is it better than Band of Brothers?
- mdorazio 7y agoCompletely agree, but I also think many shows end up being significantly longer than they probably should be. If you have a gripping story that only fits in ~4 hours, don't make it longer than 4 hours. Trying to fit narratives to traditional series / film lengths often reduces overall quality.
- colmvp 7y agoAgreed. I really liked Chernobyl but I honestly thought Breaking Bad and the first four seasons of Game of Thrones were superior, in no small part because of the high excellence that’s extremely difficult to maintain beyond a few episodes. It’s also much harder to make character development feel earned in only a few episodes.
- ddavis 7y agoI enjoyed it quite a bit, but I think w.r.t. HBO miniseries Band of Brothers is better.
- smacktoward 7y agoEh, I'm not sure Band of Brothers holds up as well as you might think. It's really strong in episodes 2 through 6, where the core characters are all together from Normandy to Market Garden to Bastogne. But after that those core characters disperse, either by getting promoted or becoming casualties, and then from there the series just kind of fizzles out; for better or worse, in those early episodes Winters is the de facto protagonist, and once he departs the show never really manages to find another one. The later sequel The Pacific suffered from the same problem of not having a stable, interesting point-of-view character for the audience to attach themselves to, only unlike Band which starts with one and then discards him The Pacific lacks one throughout.
- antisthenes 7y agoReally? I thought the last episodes were some of the strongest. They had to highlight the end of the war and the reasons for fighting it. One of the underlying points of the series was that all of them are core characters. Looking for protagonists in war is glorifying it.
- cm2187 7y agoTalking about HBO historical tv shows on the soviet union, one of their best production was Stalin (1992), with Robert Duvall impressive in Stalin. They did a series on historical figures in the 1990s. The one on the judge Falcone was also pretty good.
- kmnc 7y agoThe show is great, and it reaching this level of notoriety is amazing. Yet, it just goes to show you how everything is marketing and timing. If this show isn't on HBO, and isn't following the exit of Game of Thrones does it even get noticed? For example, The Terror, which in my opinion is just as good as this show (and features a better performance by the same actor in Chernobyl) was not only ignored by viewers but by critics alike. TV Critics are, in my opinion, completely useless and only ever write articles about popular shows. Best of lists you usually see at the end of the year make me wonder if these people even watch the shows.
- untog 7y ago> If this show isn't on HBO, and isn't following the exit of Game of Thrones does it even get noticed? Well, yes, because the article notes that it's most popular in Ireland. It was a co-production with a British company, so over there it has no connection to HBO at all. > TV Critics are, in my opinion, completely useless and only ever write articles about popular shows. Maybe TV critics giving positive reviews to a show helps make it popular?
- arethuza 7y agoOn Sky here in the UK it does say that it is a co-production with HBO Miniseries.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 7y agoIMDB is viewer ratings, not critics.
- kshacker 7y agoIt is a backlash against Game of Thrones which ended so hated that anything better got upvoted I guess.
- 420codebro 7y agoAfter watching this show I realized a very deep appreciation for those doomed men who managed / cleaned up the accident. Most of them are dead. I consider them heroes. Very sad all around.
- Kutta 7y agoAs a mid-level Chernobyl geek, I found this show generally underwhelming. I admit it may hold much more interest for those who are not yet familiar with the story. But I must say, there are so many things which could have been done spectacularly, and instead we got a very pedestrian TV affair, with ample use of disaster movie and horror movie cliches and tropes, and basic bitch cinematography. Chernobyl should deserve a more flavorful adaptation if anything does. I also hate the gray-blue color grading, it would have been far more interesting to portray Pripyat as the rather vivid and young city which it was, with warmer color tones and more humane elements, instead of defaulting to dumb USSR cliches.
- dkmar 7y agoNot sure if this is worth much, but I saw this earlier today and thought I'd leave it here. It's just an observation from a reddit user: "Cinematographer Jakob Ihre deliberately over-exposed all outdoor scenes to mimic the way the radiation during the Chernobyl disaster bleached out and destroyed the film taken at the time." [0] [0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/TVDetails/comments/bz28hw/cinematographer_jakob_ihre_deliberately/?st=jwraeek2&sh=d5362855 https://www.reddit.com/r/TVDetails/comments/bz28hw/cinematog...
- atombender 7y agoI don't disagree, but I'm curious, what could have been "done spectacularly"?
- effie 7y agoI guess the explosion, we never see it. But I think it is right they didn't do it; the effect of not seeing it is so much more true to the events and how people perceived them; I think the scenes in the control room where the operators are battling with a lack of information were a master stroke. Much better effect than some generic cgi animation could have had.
- InterimNew 7y agoWe do see the explosion in episode 5, and in my opinion it's one of the low points of the limited series. IMO the generic CGI animation you feared is exactly how it comes across.
- rossdavidh 7y agoDid anyone else find themselves wondering, "WTF does Paraguay care about Chernobyl so much more than most of Europe?" Disclaimer: I miss the point a lot.
- rdtsc 7y agoIt is really a great show. We lived close enough to Chernobyl that if the winds blew a different way we would have been seriously affected by it. And I remember when it happened. The announcement on evening news (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RuWIIiTLbFM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RuWIIiTLbFM). My dad saying "if that's what they admit to on the news, the situation is many times worse" and how we should all be very worried. Then the refugees coming to our city, and how the locals had this irrational fear and hate toward them, thinking they were "radioactive" or brought "bad luck". The promises of new apartments for the liquidators, and how some, of course, never lived long enough to enjoy them. Anyway, in the show, I think, they went above and beyond to make it authentic. Anything from the smallest details like the decor, clothes, the buildings, the things they say, the mannerisms, all of that. The lack of "Russian" accents, a common criticism I heard, never bothered me. Even the fictitious character of Ulana Khomyuk was very representative of what a woman scientist might have looked or behaved like. She reminded me of my chemistry teacher from high school.
- arethuza 7y agoI agree about how good it is - I don't think anything on TV has given me the same sense of existential dread since I watched Threads on the BBC when I was a teenager.
- andrepd 7y agoThreads is still on a completely different level. It depicts a catastrophic event, not a tragedy of modest proportions like Chernobyl.
- sam_lowry_ 7y agoYeah, the winds blew in our direction. Shortly after, my family moved to Minsk, Later on, I had military training in radiation protection in post-Chernobyl Belarus, read the transcripts of Legasov's tapes and IAEA reports on Chernobyl. Chernobyl shadowed my life, but things turned out to be mostly OK. Back to the mini-series, even the faithful repoduction of the epoch is sometimes dumb. Notice the crystal clock on Gorbatchev's table. I had one like that at home, but I am pretty sure that clock would not sit on Gorbatchev's table. It's something people had at home, not in institutions. The sequence of events is roughly similar to what actually happened, but content is unnecessarily worse than the reality. For instance, the three divers that went through radiactive waters survied, one died many years later of a heart attack, one is retired and the third one is a director at the Energy and Coal Mining Ministry of Ukraine.
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- lousken 7y agoBest episode still holds Attack on titan though. [0] https://www.imdb.com/search/title?title_type=tv_episode&num_votes=1000,&sort=user_rating,desc https://www.imdb.com/search/title?title_type=tv_episode&num_... . Also imdb doesn't really hold reliable statistics as top rated shows are often review bombed
- LargoLasskhyfv 7y agoI've been underwhelmed by this. Because they missed the opportunity to incorporate https://www.neimagazine.com/features/featurea-different-view-on-chernobyl/ https://www.neimagazine.com/features/featurea-different-view... There is endless rambling about the failure of the apparatchiks to communicate the shortcomings of the scram system for political, economical and technical reasons, which culminates in stating at the end that the emergency stop can change to an ignition switch for a bomb under special circumstances. "Weil nicht sein kann was nicht sein darf!" "And he comes to the conclusion: His mishap was an illusion, for, he reasons pointedly, that which must not, can not be!" (cited from https://www.proz.com/kudoz/german-to-english/business-commerce-general/1212105-weil-nicht-sein-kann-was-nicht-sein-darf.html#2893352 https://www.proz.com/kudoz/german-to-english/business-commer... ) Yet, regarding the different view of Konstantin Checherov they are making the same error. Guilty of falsifying history as usual. Mockumentary...
- erentz 7y agoI can't find anything else backing up Konstantin Checherov's claims. It seems like this is very much just his opinion, and they don't seem to add up: https://sputniknews.com/analysis/2006053048810128/ https://sputniknews.com/analysis/2006053048810128/
- LargoLasskhyfv 7y agoThat is from 2006. I remember a documentary in german TV from ZDF - Der Millionensarg. Therein this person https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sebastian_Pflugbeil https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sebastian_Pflugbeil walks with him through the ruin several times, and compares several videos with the floor plan, together with other people, and they all come to the conclusion that the official story makes no sense, for several reasons. Anyways, wasn't the conclusion of the last episode that it was all about saving face? Who is to say it would be any different now? Especially if there are BILLIONS to have? Hm?
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- NuSkooler 7y agoReally the only thing I think could have better is had it been in Russian. I mostly got used to it, but it would have felt better listening to Russian and reading subtitles (IMO).