Life
Life debuts tonight at 8 p.m. EDT on the Discovery Channel.
When the Discovery Channel rebroadcast the BBC's Planet Earth in 2007, it was one of the earliest examples of something that you just had to get an HDTV for. As I wrote at the time, the series had its flaws, but viewed in HD, it was a spectacle that had rarely been seen at such a scale on TV. It spanned the world, tossing us into the middle of the sorts of natural processes we city dwellers (and, hell, Westerners in general) so rarely see. And despite its rampant self congratulation, the series worked so well as a purely visual treat that the often clunky nature of Sigourney Weaver's narration (which only we U.S. citizens got and only in the original broadcasts) simply fell by the wayside. Planet Earth was all about watching moments of a big, amazing world, captured with the ultimate in technology and presented as beautiful little encapsulations of the brutish natural struggle.
So the easy thing to say is that basically everything that was right about Planet Earth is still right about Life and basically everything that was wrong about it is still wrong. There's a difference this time though: Even the standard-definition broadcast is a must watch. The technical personnel behind the series have learned how to create arresting images out of just about anything after their Planet Earth experiences, and Life (or at least the five hours I've seen of the 10-hour piece) ratchets up the heights and depths these guys are willing to go to to come up with dazzling television images. There's stuff here that feels more like it belongs in one of those periodic big screen films about the natural world that pops up every few years to critical acclaim (think Winged Migration), rather than in something that's being sold as a great series, but still just another TV nature program.
One element is going to be a deal-breaker for a lot of viewers (at least in the U.S. and at least until the DVD and Blu-Ray come out): Oprah Winfrey is narrating this spectacle, and she narrates it at her emphatic best. It's entirely possible that Winfrey knows no other way to read copy than by making it sound like she's about to give a bunch of housewives free things, but there are moments when she puts the oddest of emphases on certain words. It's often hard to escape the feeling that she's simply trying to turn the natural world into a talk show. Of course, it's also possible that the copy she's been given to read is just that bad. Particularly in the hour on mammals, the narration is so clumsily written that it just keeps reiterating the same points over and over and over, mostly about how ingenious mammals are at finding new ways to thrive or about how much of the natural world is centered around reproduction. (There's a weirdly schoolboy-ish attitude toward sex throughout the entire series, when, y'know, it is the reason so many animals – including us – do such bizarre things.)