You mean, everyone watched the TV story which has little basis in fact. Chernobyl was the worst case scenario - there's no way to build a reactor that would produce worse radiation effects when destroyed than to use a pile of graphite.
Only about 20-40% of the radioactive contaminants were spread before the fire was put out by firefighters wearing no protection. On top of that only 1 reactor burned, but it shared facilities with another reactor.
So if the fire was not put out, it could have easily been 5x worse. There were 4 reactors total, so in the absolute worst case it could've been 10x worse.