From Game of Thrones to the endless churn of superhero-movie franchises, popular entertainment in our era is largely defined by escapism. We flee a dismal present into fantasy worlds where conflict may be spectacular but lacks any sense of real cost. Who would have guessed that two of the most talked-about dramas of the spring would turn out to be Chernobyl and When They See Us? Immersive re-creations of historical horrors from the 1980s—a Soviet nuclear meltdown, a grotesquely racist miscarriage of justice in New York—these tales of system failure offer a new type of Must-See TV: let’s call it Must-Endure TV.

The genius of these shows is the way they carry out the traditional work of a documentary under the guise of entertainment. Craig Mazin’s Chernobyl, a five-part limited series that concluded its run on HBO Monday night, is a stunning spectacle whose gorgeously eerie visuals rival any CGI-powered sci-fi blockbuster. Although its dowdy, chain-smoking protagonists are physicists, bureaucrats, and disaster-area cleanup operatives, the show’s multiple deftly threaded plotlines are as knife-edge-tense as any Bourne thriller. In Ava DuVernay’s four-part When They See Us, the emphasis is on heartrending acting rather than gut-pummeling action, but it makes for grimly compelling viewing. These are effectively traumas to which you look forward, bummers to binge on.

I spent last week toggling between the two series. Instead of vegging out I was gripped with mourning for the Harlem boys whose youth drained away in jail cells, for the Soviet first responders burned and poisoned by radiation, their flesh literally dissolving before our eyes. I was one of many viewers who, as my colleague Sonia Saraiya pointed out, took to Google to find details on the actual meltdown at the Chernobyl plant in 1986 and on current nuclear facilities in the U.S. Although each miniseries is genuinely educational about the recent historical past, each also taps painfully into the veins of current political anxiety. In different ways they undermine our already-shaky trust in the invisible structures that support everyday life, whether it’s the justice system in this country or the institutions and corporations that supply our energy.

Mazin seems to have anticipated this hunger for more concrete information; Chernobyl has an accompanying podcast in which the creator provides historical context and discusses the real details behind the lightly fictionalized account—explaining which characters are composite figures, for example, and how much the current political moment inspired the narrative. The parallel with our own impending climate catastrophe is implicit as we watch a beautiful landscape rendered ghostly and ghastly, and even more so when we learn that the outcome came terrifyingly close to being far worse: potentially rendering uninhabitable an area that was home to 5 million people, along with countless wild and domestic animals, with further repercussions for the entire global ecosystem.

Part of the present-day resonance of Chernobyl comes from the way the story line hinges on the fog of lies that the Soviet government emitted to cloak the true scale of the disaster and preserve its superpower reputation on the global stage. Scientific facts are repeatedly overridden by the official line imposed by political imperatives from above, at the cost of massive unnecessary risks to the population. The obvious parallel here, as Mazin told the LA Times, is with today’s “global war on the truth”: “We look at this president who lies, outrageous lies, not little ones but outstandingly absurd lies. The truth isn’t even in the conversation. It’s just forgotten or obscured to the point where we can’t see it. That’s what Chernobyl is about.”