There’s been some rather ambivalent first reactions to Planet Earth, the epic nature documentary which has just started to be broadcast over in the US by the Discovery Channel (I’ve already seen the whole series on the BBC when it was broadcast over in the UK last year). The meat of the complaints seems to be that firstly, the scientific treatment of all that spectacular footage seems somewhat superficial, with lots of short sequences showing charismatic megafauna chasing down their prey, but little on the underlying ecosystem that supports them; and secondly that the narration, by Sigourney Weaver, veers jarringly between excessive self-congratulation (‘captured on film for the first time ever!”) and earth-mother woo (‘nature is a cruel mistress’).
The second criticism is entirely the Discovery channel’s fault: they replaced David Attenborough! The most trusted celebrity in the UK! A guy who has been making top nature documentaries for about 40 years! ‘Brain-dead’ doesn’t even begin to cover that decision. The first, however, once again highlights the tension between entertaining and informing which dogs any popular science programme.
The aim of any TV programme is obviously to get people to watch it: the people making the programme want the public to watch and be inspired by the amazing footage, and because this series obviously cost vast amounts of money to make (even the BBC didn’t go it alone for this one), the people funding it want maximise that audience as much as possible to recoup that outlay. This means that they can’t ignore the fact that most people are far more likely to tune in to watch a montage of polar bear cubs, blue whales and lions bringing down gazelles than a 25 minute study on the life cycle of a lowly invertebrate. The trick is to catch people’s attention with the blockbuster sequences and then leverage in the less well-known inhabitants and parts of the ecosystem that are just as interesting and important (if not more so). As scientists, we might wish that the weighting was a little more in favour of the latter: but if someone drawn in to watch the polar bears learns even one thing that they didn’t know before about the polar regions, that’s surely a good thing. Also, many of the ‘charismatic megafauna’ sequences are often of behaviour which has never been filmed before (which is true even if you are having the fact rammed down your throat every 5 minutes), and gives people a chance to see even quite well-known animals in a new light.
If I had a misgiving, it would be that this series seems to have had its genesis in a list of ‘cool things that we now have the technology to go and film’, and the attempts to integrate all the footage into a coherent picture came later. When I watched it, I generally thought they’d done a pretty good job, so it could be that this problem is exacerbated by the new narration. Still, any series which is trying to cover the entire planet is always going to feel a little rushed, even over twelve episodes.
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