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The new Brazilian drama on Netflix, Radioactive Emergency, is a fictionalized account of a real-life 1987 radiological accident in the city of Goiânia. Four people died, but health officials examined over 110,000 people and found over 240 were contaminated. How this happened, and what the response was, are explored in the series.
RADIOACTIVE EMERGENCY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: Two young guys push a wheelbarrow down a street as they talk about things young guys talk about. “Goiânia, Goiás, Brazil. September 13, 1987.”
The Gist: The boys approach an abandoned clinic, and one points out to the other the bulbous device on the ground that he had spotted earlier. He thinks it’s full of lead and will fetch a lot of money from Evenildo (Bukassa Kabengele), the junk dealer they sell to. They pull the canister out of the device.
Five days later, Evenildo buys it, and has the bottom part removed by his workers. When he notices that bottom part is glowing, though, he brings it home. Ten days after that, his wife Antônia (Ana Costa) is sick, and wants the “lunchbox” out of the house. She and a worker bring it to the city’s health department. Not knowing what the item is, Jânio (Ricardo Gelli), who is in charge of the office, has his secretary put in on a chair in the courtyard and sends Antônia to the hospital.
A doctor at the hospital, seeing the symptoms of Antônia and others, calls his old neighbor’s house, knowing that the neighbor’s son, Márcio (Johnny Massaro), is home for the weekend to celebrate his father’s birthday. Márcio is a nuclear physicist, and the doctor thinks the symptoms he’s seeing are consistent with radiation poisoning.
Jânio meets Márcio, who wants to find a scintillometer. When the device goes crazy as they approach the health department office, Márcio figures out that the item that was in the courtyard was radioactive. He says the entire building should be evacuated, and then he and Jânio go to the junkyard and try to convince Evenildo to do the same. He thinks they’re there to arrest him, so he refuses.
Eventually, the state’s health director and governor are consulted, and CNEN in Rio is called. The director at the nuclear regulatory agency, Dr. Orenstein (Paulo Gorgulho) finds out from Márcio that the device came from a radiological clinic, and was overlooked when the clinic was dismantled. One big problem: The device contains cesium-137, a radioactive powder that can spread quickly and contaminate a wide area if not contained.
Photo; Courtesy of Netflix / 2026What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Created by Gustavo Lipsztein, Radioactive Emergency reminds us of other based-on-a-true-story disaster series, like Five Days At Memorial, Every Minute Counts and After The Flood.
Our Take: As is the case with most fictionalized accounts of historic disasters, Radioactive Emergency tries to put a human face on one of a country’s most newsworthy incidents, with new characters based on amalgamations of real people going through the events of the incident. The show’s writers try to give the characters personal stories, but for the most part those stories take a back seat once the disaster starts to unfold.
The potential scope of the disaster is well communicated by Márcio by the end of the first episode, so we don’t spend a ton of time watching people not knowing what to do with this glowing object that seems to be making people sick. Goiânia is a city of over a million people, and the fact that this device, and the cesium-137 powder it contains, has been floating around the city for over a week means that potentially thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of people could have been contaminated.
The story concentrates on Márcio and Dr. Orenstein trying to do contract tracing to make sure everyone who may have been in contact with the device — or the people who were in contact — have been isolated and treated. We all know from our COVID experience how tough contract tracing really is, given all the people you potentially come in contact with on a daily basis. As the disaster escalates, we’re going to see just how panicked everyone gets, while seeing how the people who came in closest contact with the device fare.
But what we’re not going to care about are the personal stories. Márcio is in conflict about not being in touch with his dad? His girlfriend is pregnant? None of that matters once things get out of hand. Esther (Leandra Leal), a physicist at the Institute for Radioprotection and Dosimetry, will also be involved, but we know nothing more about her than what her job is. Oresnstein is a crusty but friendly old scientist, but that’s all we know about him.
Photo; Courtesy of NetflixPerformance Worth Watching: Johnny Massaro has a commanding presence as Márcio, whom Orenstein and others look to for calm leadership despite how young he is.
Sex And Skin: None.
Parting Shot: In a workshop at the junkyard, we see loose, glowing cesium-137 powder on a table.
Sleeper Star: Bukassa Kabengele does a good job as the skeptical Evenildo, who doesn’t want to leave his house even though it’s thoroughly contaminated.
Most Pilot-y Line: Orenstein is first seen defending nuclear power to a trio of teenage reporters, which is quite an ironic scene.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Radioactive Emergency is a fictionalized account of one of Brazil’s biggest radiological disasters that mostly sticks to the business of the disaster itself. It tries to make the stories of its characters more personal, but those stories are sketches at best.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
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