Who can forget the marine iguanas of Planet Earth II, escaping from the jaws of hungry racer snakes? But in chasing drama, some of the shows became thinner and messier. More would follow- Life, Frozen Planet, Africa, Life Story, The Hunt, Planet Earth II, and now Blue Planet II-each one hewing to many of the same ideas that Blue Planet pioneered.Īlong the way, the programs became less didactic, dialing down the lecturing and ratcheting up the drama to connect audiences with the animals they were seeing. Buoyed by the series’ success, Fothergill commissioned Planet Earth-an even more ambitious and more successful show that followed the same blockbuster template.
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It spawned a live concert tour.įearing a world of shrinking budgets, The Telegraph wrote, “ this may be the last television series of its kind”-a prediction that hasn’t aged well.
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It was repackaged into a 90-minute film called Deep Blue that screened in movie theaters, the cinematic footage becoming truly cinematic. It included its own extras-10-minute segments that capped each episode to show how the marvelous shots were achieved. Blue Planet was sold to over 50 countries. The BBC had created landmark nature series before, like Attenborough’s seminal Life on Earth-but here was the true dawn of the nature documentary as worldwide event. Over 12 million people tuned in to watch orcas running down a gray-whale mother and her calf newly discovered species like the dumbo octopus with its earlike head flaps and the now-obligatory sequences in which schools of small fish get obliterated by a sequence of predators-marlin, tuna, dolphins, birds, and as if that wasn’t enough, a whale. He somehow convinced the BBC to spend $10 million on a seven-year shoot, making The Blue Planet the most expensive natural-history series thus far created. It was the brainchild of filmmaker Alastair Fothergill, then the youngest-ever director of the NHU. This trend began, ironically enough, with the original Blue Planet series in 2001. In showing nature’s spectacles, they have become spectacles in themselves. They come with trailers, posters, merchandise and, as in the case of Blue Planet II, a Hans Zimmer score. They have plots that audiences care about not knowing beforehand.
And they reflect that wildlife shows have gone far beyond stately theses (think early David Attenborough) or brash showboating (think Steve Irwin). They are warranted, and often demanded by audiences. That I included spoiler warnings for a nature documentary is telling. It has drama, a plucky underdog (underpus?), and a twist ending. Here is a fight scene brought to you by millions of years of evolution, and weeks of stakeouts by ever-patient camera-people.
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Such behavior has never been witnessed by either TV audiences or scientists, and it is as thrilling a bit of television as exists. As a shark investigates, the octopus explodes out of its ersatz armor, and jets to safety. So-and again, spoiler warning-it grabs nearby shells with its suckers and arranges them into a protective dome. It is released but now finds itself in open water, patrolled by more pyjama sharks. Even though the octopus finds itself at the wrong end of a shark, it manages to escape by-and major spoiler alert- slipping an arm into the shark’s gill slits to prevent it from breathing. As it goes about its business, ambushing wayward crabs and hiding in crevices, it becomes suddenly menaced by a pyjama shark-a small and slender predator that yanks it out of its hidey-hole. The resulting episodes, each narrated by David Attenborough in his trademark velvety tones, are hour-long distillations of wonder, featuring sequences that would be breathtaking had earlier shots left you with any breath to take away.Ĭonsider the octopus from the “Green Seas” episode. They literally stared into the abyss-and then repeatedly entered it. They hung off speedboats to film dolphins rocketing behind them. They stuck their cameras into coral crevices. The Blue Planet II crew traveled to 39 countries to capture over 6,000 hours of footage. It is almost transcendentally good-the product of a team that, after six decades of experience, is now at the height of its powers. I offer these tidbits, these credentials, to properly frame the following claim:īlue Planet II is the greatest nature series that the BBC has ever produced. I celebrated David Attenborough’s recent 90th birthday by binge-watching all 79 episodes of his Life Collection for the umpteenth time, and ranking them all. In the intervening decades, I have devoured almost every show that the NHU has cared to make. I remember exactly when and where I first came across their work-a VHS copy of Life on Earth, bought from the gift shop of London’s Natural History Museum at the age of 8.
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