So I decided to watch this and ended up watching 3 episodes yesterday and the last 2 episodes today. It was definitely an excellent show and very well done. I think the main words that describe it are "horrifying" and "dread." I noticed that the Wikipedia page for it has the genre as "historical drama" and "tragedy." And I thought "Yeaaah, tragedy describes it pretty well." I do know that the show really exaggerates a lot, but that happens in any historical drama for the sake of making it more interesting and they did go to pretty far lengths to include a ton of info that isn't widely known about the disaster by people who haven't looked into it.
Not at all. It would have REALLY annoyed me if it had been in English with Russian/Ukrainian/Bellarussian accents, and I did find it kind of odd how they would have parts in Russian with no subtitles, then it would just switch to English, but overall, I thought doing it in English was the right approach. I mean, it was a US/UK co-production with no actors fluent in Russian (Stellan Skarsgård is the only actor on the show who I think actually speaks any degree of Russian, but I think he has a pretty strong Swedish accent in Russian). And even with the idea of getting Ukrainian and Russian actors to do it, the director, writer, producers, and other staff were all from the US, UK, Sweden, Iceland, and so on. If you're going to do the show in Russian/Ukrainian, it'd be best if the cast was fluent in those languages. Plus, you wouldn't be able to use actors from any countries except the former Soviet Union (I think it's better to use native Russian speakers than to have non-native speakers butcher the pronunciation just so you can have it in the historical language. Otherwise, what's the point? As a person example, 90% of the time I hear Japanese spoken in Hollywood movies, I just wish they'd either gotten native speakers or just had them speak in English since they usually use Chinese, Korean, or Asian-American actors whose pronunciation is pretty atrocious).
On the other hand, if it had been a Ukrainian or Russian company making the show, then yeah, it should've been in the original languages and I would have loved to watch it that way. But it was a US/UK production. :shrug: And I thought it was an amazing show.