A biblical rainstorm descending on New York seemed like the perfect time to dip into the Netflix drama "The Days" about the Fukushima disaster. Nuclear-themed disasters based on real events are a very small  subset of disaster movies and so far seem to produce gripping and disturbing dramas. HBO's "Chernobyl" was one of the best pieces of television I've ever seen. It had enormous weight because it told stories close to a terrible truth. After one episode, "The Days" feels like it might have a similar importance. Natural disasters become dramatic devices for writers (often cheap ones) but when they occur in real life, they have the power of works of art. Like an artist's creation, nature's works re-contextualize our lives in a dramatic way. They magnify what's important and make clear that what we thought mattered is completely trivial. Science fiction puts us on strange planets to explain Earth and creates aliens to define humanity. In real life, when waters surge to dangerous levels as happened with Katrina and Sandy, or the sun turns orange because of wildfires miles and miles away our minds flash back to those disaster movies. I saw the nuclear Holocaust film "The Day After" on TV when I was in high-school and it terrified me. It made the unthinkable real. The characters in "Fukushima" (in the series and in real life) never imagined they would be confronted with this terrible test. Did it change them? Or, did they revert back to the mean of ordinary life after living on the extraordinary edges of it? A person can't stay there forever, I suppose. But it's good to be reminded of the stakes once in a while at a safe distance.