Russia Is So Pissed About HBO's 'Chernobyl,' It's Creating Its Own Series

From Men's Health

• A Russian company has filmed a series about Chernobyl.

• The show will depict an American CIA operative at Chernobyl conducting sabotage.

• This runs counter to what most experts believe today: the Chernobyl disaster was caused by a mix of faulty reactor design and human error.

HBO's Chernobyl is so well-loved that it's now the highest-rated TV show on IMDb, and the show is even boosting tourism to Chernobyl Power Plant tours. However, there's a rather large entity that isn't a fan of the miniseries: the Russian government.

As The Washington Post reports, Russia is so upset about the HBO show that a Russian company has decided to film its own series about Chernobyl-and in this version, the United States plays a role in the disaster. The Russian show will depict an American CIA operative at Chernobyl conducting sabotage, and a group of KGB officials will try to track down the infiltrator.

The show's director, Alexei Muradov, told The Moscow Times, "One theory holds that Americans had infiltrated the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and many historians do not deny that, on the day of the explosion, an agent of the enemy’s intelligence services was present at the station."

The World Nuclear Association makes it clear that Chernobyl disaster was caused by a mix of faulty reactor design and human error.

According to the The Hollywood Reporter, the show will air on NTV, a Russian network known for their pro-Kremlin programming. The show is also partially funded by the government’s cultural ministry.

Columnist Ilya Shepelin explained the real reason for the government's dissatisfaction with the series in The Moscow Times. "The fact that an American, not a Russian, TV channel tells us about our own heroes is a source of shame that the pro-Kremlin media apparently cannot live down," Shepelin wrote. "And this is the real reason they find fault with HBO’s Chernobyl series."

Interestingly, fans in India are also calling for their own version of Chernobyl. In 1984, an accident at the Bhopal plant in central India caused about 4,000 deaths, but some estimates have that number closer to 15,000.

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