Barry Keoghan as Pavel in Chernobyl (2019)
By
Guy Howie
Published Feb 27, 2026, 9:30 PM EST
After joining Screen Rant in January 2025, Guy became a Senior Features Writer in March of the same year, and now specializes in features about classic TV shows. With several years' experience writing for and editing TV, film and music publications, his areas of expertise include a wide range of genres, from comedies, animated series, and crime dramas, to Westerns and political thrillers.
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HBO’s true story of a harrowing nuclear disaster, Chernobyl is widely regarded as one of the greatest historical drama series of all time. Now, seven years after its release, the show is getting a Netflix rival, in the form of Brazilian drama Radioactive Emergency. This new series will cover another similarly horrific real-life incident involving nuclear contamination.
Radioactive Emergency has a lot to live up to when it comes to the dramatization of nuclear disasters for television, given that HBO’s Chernobyl has raised the bar so high. This gripping five-part drama from 2019 ranks among the best miniseries ever made, offering unparalleled attention to historical details and emphasizing the first-hand realities of those who were there.
As terrifying as many nuclear war movies and TV shows manage to make the prospect of mutually assured destruction coming to pass, there’s something even more frightening about the idea of uncontrolled radiation poisoning spreading across a population purely by accident. If Chernobyl is anything to go by, then Radioactive Emergency is going to be a difficult but worthwhile watch.
Netflix Is Releasing The Nuclear Disaster Series Radioactive Emergency In March
Johnny Massaro in Netflix's Radioactive Emergency (2026)
This Brazilian drama series comes to Netflix worldwide on March 18. It stars Johnny Massaro, Tuca Andrada, and Paulo Gorgulho as the protagonists in a real-life tragedy that saw a radioactive substance spread unknowingly across a city, resulting in four fatalities and 249 contaminated patients.
What this show depicts isn’t a post-apocalyptic nuclear wasteland akin to Fallout, or a reactor meltdown on the scale of the Chernobyl disaster. Yet, the deadly effects of the accident on which it centers were just as serious as those of a more eye-catching disaster.
Once nuclear contamination is at large in a densely-populated area, it’s virtually impossible to control, as Radioactive Emergency will demonstrate. That the show is based on a true story makes its events even more chilling.
Radioactive Emergency Is Inspired By The 1987 Goiânia Caesium-137 Disaster In Brazil
Johnny Massaro in Netflix's Radioactive Emergency (2026)
In September 1987, the theft of an abandoned radiotherapy unit from the site of a former medical facility in Goiânia started a devastating chain of events in this central Brazilian city. Those who stole the unit thought they could sell its parts as scrap, but unwittingly gave themselves radiation poisoning, and passed it on to those around them.
The unit contained highly dangerous amounts of caesium-137, a radioactive isotope commonly used for radiation therapy to treat cancer. This isotope was also the main source of radiation poisoning around the site of the Chernobyl disaster in Soviet Ukraine. Much like the HBO drama about that disaster, Radioactive Emergency is probably the kind of show you can only watch once.
Radioactive Emergency Will Be As Hard To Watch As HBO’s Chernobyl
Chernobyl HBO TV series
HBO’s Chernobyl is a masterpiece precisely because it’s so hard to watch. The show brings home the full horror of the terrible event it portrays by capturing the immediate context of the disaster in vivid detail, while personalizing every aspect of the tragedy.
If Radioactive Emergency does half as well in its depiction of the Goiânia, then it will tell us a story that’s both horrifying and transfixing in equal measure. The specifics of the show’s story might be less attention-grabbing than those of Chernobyl, but its smaller scale won’t make it any easier to watch.
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