By "spectacular" I did not primarily mean visual effects, and I think the production value of effects in the series is perfectly okay, I instead meant effective dramatization. I've only seen up to episode 3 now, but I can elaborate a bit on perhaps my biggest specific complaint so far: basically, too much fallback on disaster movie tropes, too much screen time on languid dialogues instead of trying to show much more of the vast amount of documented fascinating stories and details. It should be less about pondering the gravity of the situation with pained expressions, or grave and silent meetings with Gorbachev reminiscent of Hollywood disaster movies; instead the reality of the first few days must have been an absolute frenzy of activity, with massive organizational and logistical challenges, redirecting kilotons of material and equipment and thousands of personnel from all across the USSR. Such challenges are merely mentioned in the episodes, but we get no subjective sense of it, there is no administrative frenzy around Legasov and Scherbina. I am reminded of the Shin Godzilla movie, which is admittedly not realistic overall, but the beginning of it had a spectacular rendition of governmental and military bureaucracy kicked into panicked activity. In comparison, the Chernobyl version is rather dull and stilted. A painful issue with mainstream TV is that there is a core assumption that the audience cares mostly about personal stories but not about technical, procedural and sociological topics, and I get the impression that an HBO show cannot fundamentally break out of this box. Hence, we don't get any information about how radiation actually works and the fundamental mechanisms of its dangers and mitigation, we instead get spooky bullshit about "trillions of bullets".

So, the biggest issue was pacing, script and focus. I could also talk about photography and cinematography, which I think has been fine so far; but I would have been happier with something more creative and adventurous. I've been drawn to the topic of Chernobyl because it evokes a singular feeling of dread and awe. I'm not sure how to best evoke dread and awe; the Chernobyl TV version seemed to have succeeded to some extent, but I think that it only utilized a tiny and conventional sliver of the visual and directorial possibilities.