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Comment by danuker | Hacker News Reader

I am particularly salty about HBO's Chernobyl.

Thunderfoot showed how misleading it was: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsdLDFtbdrA

That series was a historical drama, not a documentary. Ulana Khomyuk, the woman speaking at the start of that video, didn’t even exist. As acknowledged in the series itself, she was a composite of several Soviet scientists for narrative purposes.

It’s not misleading to take artistic liberties in a work of fiction designed to entertain, even if based on true events. That would be damming for a documentary, but this was not one.

Pretty much any biopic or historical documentary struggles with the tension between the realities that, on the one hand, they can't completely make up everything out of whole cloth and, on the other, the writers don't want to let facts get too much in the way of a good story.

But some number of people get POd when not everything is literally true.

I think people get angry when something turns out being different in nature than what they expected, especially when it comes to accuracy. If I start watching a show, and most of the information matches with my understanding of the topic, I might start to believe that it's more of a documentary. Then something comes up that unrealistic, or I know to be false, I might feel tricked.

I'd love it if instead of saying "The following story is based on true events", they were obligated to say "The following story is based on true events, and has been modified for your entertainment".

A lot of series now cheekily start with a screen that states something along the lines of:

"This story is based on true events, except the parts that aren't".

Can't think of any examples at the moment, but I've noticed it quite a bit.

Then there's the TV Series Fargo, which is made out of whole-cloth but starts with a claim that it's a "true story", which I think is great.

I’m pretty sure the Coen brothers are trying to say something like this with Fargo

That should have been historical drama, to be clear.

But some number of people get POd when not everything is literally true.

By pandering to irrational fears about nuclear power, 'Chernobyl' and similar works have consequences that translate, more or less directly, into fossil-fuel pollution.

I'm inclined to be more forgiving towards a Borges manqué who uses his talents to defraud hipster travel websites than I am towards people who are successful enough at spreading FUD and bullshit that they make the world an objectively-worse place.

Chernobyl seems like an odd target for such overwrought criticism. It's not like it was dramatizing a nuclear reactor accident that didn't happen. By general consensus, it was pretty true to life as far as the main points were concerned.

A related thing I 'learnt' (or rather 'realised' having not thitherto thought about) via Fargo was that 'true story' are just words you can say, they don't mean anything and there's no regulatory oversight or whatever.

The showrunners agonized over making the show historically accurate vs fitting the story into a TV format. It sounds like they traded the minor details to get the broad brushstrokes right - and especially dissect the themes around hubris, willful ignorance, and so on. The 'making of' podcast where they discuss this is quite interesting:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-chernobyl-podcast/...

He seems to be completely missing the distinction between what might be said in a meeting with high ranking politicians and what you might write in a nuclear physics exam. It's not unreasonable for someone to greatly exaggerate, talk confidently about stuff they're actually very unsure about and even straight up lie in such a situation.

Thunderfoot has pretty dubious credibility as it is though...

It's sort of like, once you make a name for yourself by pointing out what is wrong, suddenly everything becomes wrong.

See also EEVBlog, former electronics hobbyism turned exposé of enormous niche scams/bad product ideas you've never heard of.

I understand calling him pompous, or an ass, and he had that period where he basically was a part of gamergate for a minute (maybe he still believes those kinds of things, I'm not in his head). He definitely will take a "debunking" that should take two minutes of math, and spends 20 minutes basically reveling in "just how wrong" the supposed Bad Man is.

But when has he been wrong, in a way that would cause you to call his credibility "dubious"? When has he called out an Infinite energy machine, or a "pull water out of the air in a desert" machine, or an Elon project, and been wrong?

Well, IIRC, he said there was no economic or technical advantage to reusing rockets, and predicted the demise of SpaceX. That Tesla would never produce a semi-truck, then when it did he significantly misrepresented the details so he could "bust" it. And probably others. I try not to waste much brain space storing his BS.

It was not historically accurate, but it was, nonetheless, an excellent drama.

This is why I bounce hard off of anything that could be labelled "historical fiction".

I don't know enough about, e.g., the JFK assassination, to be sure that a dramatization of it isn't going to fill in the gaps and make me think I do know something that turns out to be serving the agenda of others, or simply wrong.

And yes I recognize that "history" is just the consensus version of "historical fiction", and that consensus is local at best, and often also serving an agenda!

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