of the best right now on Netflix 5

1. e Night Agent e Night Agent doesn’t do anything particularly new – it’s a twisty, turny US thriller series-bynumbers – but it has the essentials down pat. Gabriel Basso plays young FBI agent Peter Sutherland, assigned to the graveyard shift on a Whitehouse hotline after his involvement in a dramatic terrorist incident. Before long he’s answering a late night call from a young entrepreneur, and helping her evade the attentions of a pair of paid killers. e leads are likeable, everything moves along at a fair old lick, and the whole thing is good solid entertainment.

2. e Diplomat e Days, a new limited series on Net ix, aims to show us what really happened during the Fukushima nuclear disaster.

Sky Original’s Chernobyl, which tells “the true story of one of the worst man-made catastrophes in history and tells of the brave men and women who sacri ced themselves to save Europe from unimaginable disaster”, has been hailed as one of the “greatest TV shows of all time”.

Now, Net ix is seemingly hoping to achieve the same critical acclaim with its own dramatisation of a historic nuclear disaster.

And, yes, if it’s even half as good as Chernobyl was, we suspect e Days (which has been adapted from On e Brink: e Inside Story

Of Fukushima Daiichi by Ryusho Kadota) will have everyone gripped from start to nish.

Here’s what you need to know about the limited series. e sudden loss of electric power meant that the pumps used to cool down the reactor cores stopped working, prompting three nuclear meltdowns and several hydrogen explosions. Shockingly large amounts of radiation were released into the atmosphere and the Paci c Ocean, prompting mass evacuations and an ever-widening exclusion zone. It was the most severe nuclear accident since the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. And the e ects are still being felt, even now. Indeed, tens of thousands of workers will be needed over the next 30 to 40 years to safely remove the nuclear waste still kept at the site.

On March 11, 2011, a 9.0 magnitude earthquake rocked Japan. e event triggered an extremely powerful tsunami, and the subsequent waves – some of which were recorded to be 14 metres high – ooded the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant and damaged its emergency diesel generators.

Reports, too, have suggested that the government plans to release more than 1 million tonnes of radioactive wastewater back into the Paci c Ocean – something that Greenpeace is lobbying against, saying it contains “dangerous levels of carbon-14”, a radioactive substance that has the “potential to damage human DNA”.

As per the o cial synopsis for e Days, the eightepisode series, which has been based on meticulous research, is “a multi-layered drama that depicts the accident from three di erent perspectives in great detail.

“ is is the true story of seven intense days, showing what really happened on that day and at that place from the viewpoints of the government, the corpora- tion and the people who risked their lives on site, and in doing so coming closer to the truth,” it adds. What was the real-life impact of the Fukushima nuclear disaster?

It is important to note that, while there were no deaths immediately during the nuclear disaster, the BBC reports that a number of people died in the evacuation, including dozens of hospital patients who had to be moved due to fears of radiation.

According to Japanese health and radiation specialist Shunichi Yamashita, too, the “life expectancy of the evacuees has dropped from 65 to 58 years – not because of cancer, but because of depression, alcoholism and suicide”.

Koji Yakusho will lead the series, playing a character modelled after Masao Yoshida, the plant manager at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.