Chernobyl has won acclaim in recreating the horrors of the 1986 nuclear disaster, though it seems there were some things that were too extreme to put on screen.
Among the disturbing images was a moment in episode three that showed firefighter Vasily Ignatenko's burned, decaying body as he lay close to death.
While the shots of him were not extensive, creator Craig Mazin has revealed that they originally approached the scene differently.
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"Yeah we had to be really careful in episode three when we showed the final stage of Vasily Ignatenko’s body," he told The Hollywood Reporter.
"It was the most extreme thing that we showed, and our makeup and prosthetic designer Daniel Parker did a brilliant job — so brilliant, in fact, that there was a concern that we lingered on it a bit.
"HBO was so supportive and so great, and Kary Antholis, who was the head of HBO miniseries when we were making the show, said, 'You know, can you just shorten that shot? Because it feels like you’re forcing us to look at this, like you're almost proud of it.'
"I did not intend that, and that’s not what we want at all. Sometimes you lose sight of those things, because you watched the prosthetics being built, and then you don't quite get how impactful it is.
"So we shortened that shot by quite a bit, because the last thing we wanted was to feel like we were trading on this man's sad fate for sensationalist points on a TV show. What we wanted was for people to see the truth of what happens, but we didn't want to feel like we were exploiting it.
"Those were the things we were dealing with all the time, because that man was a real person, and his wife is still alive, and the last thing we want to do is show anything other than total respect."
Mazin also revealed that there was a sub-plot focusing on Paul Ritter's deputy chief-engineer character Anatoly Dyatlov that was also cut out.
"We shot a sub-story about Dyatlov, Paul Ritter’s character, which touched on his history," he continued. "Chernobyl was not Dyatlov's first nuclear disaster, he had actually been involved in another one years earlier, when he was a nuclear engineer at a submarine base.
"He received a pretty steep dose of radiation, a dose that theoretically could have killed him. It didn't, the guy was tough, but his son died about a year later of leukemia, and there was an implication that whatever contamination Dyatlov experienced, he may have brought home with him and it may have impacted his son's health.
"From a writing point of view, if you have some backstory that helps explain a character’s motive, or creates sympathy for an unsympathetic character, it's generally seen as a useful thing.
"But I just ultimately didn’t feel like it was justified. It felt like I was stretching. I could make the case [for keeping it], but it felt a little Hollywood. Ultimately, when we looked at the cut, we didn’t need it."
Chernobyl airs on Sky Atlantic. You can also watch Chernobyl on NOW TV.
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Sam is a freelance reporter and sub-editor who has a particular interest in movies, TV and music. After completing a journalism Masters at City University, London, Sam joined Digital Spy as a reporter, and has also freelanced for publications such as NME and Screen International. Sam, who also has a degree in Film, can wax lyrical about everything from Lord of the Rings to Love Is Blind, and is equally in his element crossing every 't' and dotting every 'i' as a sub-editor.
