Since the start of HBO’s mini-series about the 1986 nuclear disaster, “Chernobyl,” journalists have praised the series for getting the facts of the event right, even if its creators took some creative liberties.

“The first thing to understand about the HBO mini-series “Chernobyl,” wrote a reporter for The New York Times, “is that a lot of it is made up. But here’s the second, and more important, thing: It doesn’t really matter.”

The reporter notes a similar inaccuracy I wrote about last month: “radiation victims are often covered in blood for some reason.”

But HBO “gets a basic truth right,” he writes, which is that Chernobyl was “more about lies, deceit and a rotting political system than… whether nuclear power is inherently good or bad.”