The Changing World of Nature Documentaries
44:08 Share

Hi, it's Chloe Mao. I'm the editor of Vogue.com and co-host of The Run-Through with Vogue. And in case you haven't heard, Vogue just launched our all-new app. Through the app, you can chat with me and other editors on everything happening in fashion, shop editor favorites, and vote on the best looks of the season. Get real-time updates now so you never miss a moment. Download the Vogue app today.

This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. You chose to hit play on this podcast today. Smart choice. Make another smart choice with AutoQuote Explorer to compare rates from multiple car insurance companies all at once. Try it at Progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Not available in all states or situations. Prices vary based on how you buy. Are we proud to be mammals?

I mean, that's a good question, actually. Are we the worst mammal? I mean, certainly. Just in the sense that, you know, a cheetah could viciously tear an antelope limb from limb. You know what I mean? Like, the cheetah's capacity for, you know, intellection and understanding of what she's doing is not ours. So when we prey—

On a weaker, even though we might do it in a less overtly vicious way, we're probably worse because we know what we're doing. Oh, yeah. I mean, we are wonderful in a terrible species, but I know what the second worst mammal is, the orca.

Jump, Free Willy. Did you guys see what the orca did? With the whale calf? Attacking the whale calves. Oh. One of them was killed on sight, drowned immediately within view of its mother. The other one was taken hostage, just, there we go, I'm swimming on a back just like I'm used to, splashing around, and then it was drowned. And then drowned, yeah. Let's just hope they don't make it onto land. Well, they're...

like destroying cruise ships and yachts all over Spain every day. That I'm okay with. I mean... That's fine with me. I say go after any cruise ship or any yacht, but please leave the whale calves alone. Welcome to Critics at Large, a podcast from The New Yorker. I'm Alex Schwartz. I'm Nomi Frye. And I'm Vincent Cunningham. Each week on this show, we make sense of what's happening...

In the culture right now. Excuse me, I'm so sorry. Too much Attenborough. Too much. Oh, God. What's happening in the culture right now and how we got here. How are you guys doing? Sir David, are you in the room? I'm sort of in the room. Oh, that's not bad, Vincent. That was pretty good. Yeah. I have always been weirdly comforted by nature documents.

whenever they kind of show up on my TV screen. They bring me to a world I don't have access to, and most of the time, a world that I don't even know, even when I'm in nature, I don't know to look for it. Sure. Right? They render them in gorgeous images. The deep blue of the ocean, the green and yellow of the savannah,

These documentaries have, like, never, by the way, been more advanced. Isn't it amazing, like, some of the, like, just the scenes and shots? Incredible. It's actually crazy. Underground. Mind-blowing. With the mole rat. Mind-blowing. How is it possible? It's extraordinary. I mean, the glint on those mole rat teeth. Those chompers. Those big, vertical, horrible teeth. I love mole rats. Do you? Always have. Always will. Very cute. The naked mole rat is my favorite, but I will go in for other mole rats.

mole rat, gerbil, this kind of thing, I don't want to see. Can we get back to the majesty of the whale? Why are we looking at this? Oh, Vincent. It's all about the diversity of the Earth's creatures. Well, that part can just stay underground. But anyway, one example of what we're going to talk about today is called Mammals. It's a new BBC documentary voiced by David Attenborough himself. Before dawn arrives...

These wily coyotes retreat into the shadows. It's the adaptability and ingenuity of these mammals, indeed of all nocturnal mammals, that has enabled them to become active in conditions that we avoid.

The first episode of Mammals premieres this weekend, and we're going to talk about that new series today. But we'll also be looking at nature documentaries more broadly. This is obviously a tried and true kind of old genre that in recent years has experienced resurgence. Streaming services are pouring huge amounts of money into this kind of nature programming. I've seen this moment talked about as a nature doc's gold rush.

We'll also talk about how our deepening despair over climate change creates a new, uneasy context for The Nature Doc. What at some point was for many people a form of escapism has, especially over the past few decades, become quite literally documentary. A way of acknowledging that these beautiful species, complex ecosystems are disappearing before our very eyes.

Can we really enjoy an art form whose main job is to record how things on our planet look now before it all changes for the worse? So that's today on Critics At Large, the changing world of nature documentaries. Do you guys...

We're all New Yorkers here, but do you guys also consider yourselves at all in any sense to be nature people? I love nature. And I appreciate nature. I can think of some people in my immediate acquaintance who know vastly more than I do. Okay. Are you often on like hikes or camping trips with those people in your immediate acquaintance? No. Okay. But she loves it. Not me.

I would say that I'm absolutely not a nature person. To everyone's surprise and shock, I'm sure. I love observing nature from a constructed environment. Some of our listeners might not know that Nomi, to me, famously has allowed a possum to become a member of her household. That's true. So I don't know what you're talking about. But remember, that is within the built environment.

I mean, I didn't invite him in. He came in through the cat door. But then you were like, you're welcome. Come in, sir. It was a running character on your Instagram. I don't know what you're talking about. So, okay. So the story is I live in Brooklyn and I have two cats. So there's a cat door.

You know, we're sitting on the couch and we saw a whiskered pointy snout suddenly poke itself into the domestic space. An unfamiliar visage. He came in and...

Little by little, you know, because he was quite insistent. He would come to the stoop outside the door and we would be like, oh, there he is again. This little guy who we named Biden. I was waiting for you to divulge that. Because this was in 2020. And so he started coming to visit. We would give him cat food.

And eventually he just went away. They're itinerant creatures, as I read on Wikipedia. So we may never see his kind again. No. He's a Rolling Stone. He's, you know, he's much like the answer. He's blowing in the wind. He came in through the bathroom window and off he went. You know, Biden.

That Biden left. He was a one-timer. He was a one-timer. Yeah. He knew when it was time. Yeah. That Biden knew when it was time. He knew when it was time. A lesson to us all. Yeah. Yeah.

We know what we think about nature itself, but what about nature documentaries? So for me, I will admit, nature documentaries, I've always really loved them, but as what people now call kind of ambient TV. Something to have on, pay attention to very closely at some moments, but then kind of retreat from. Putz around, clean, let's face it, smoke weed, do something else and just kind of hang out while it's on.

adoring the images but not like not paying as close attention to it as i would like a movie or whatever right how about you guys i like nature documentaries it's interesting because you know we were watching mammals the the new david ambrose series for today and i realized i i

I don't seek them out. But when I watch them, I always remember that they're great. Yeah. What a world. What a world. You know? Do you know what I mean? Does that make sense? Absolutely. It makes total sense. I mean, the splendor of the world and the diversity of the world and its environments and its species is stunning. And it's mind-blowing.

And I did watch Mammals with a different kind of attention because I knew we were going to be discussing it. And I found that that kind of attention paid off hugely. That's right. So, yes.

Mammals is a new series. It's six parts. The first episode premieres this Saturday on BBC America, and the rest are going to run over the course of the summer, which I think is great. The summer seems like nature doc season to me. This is not directed by Sir David. He is simply the beautifully organ-toned presenter. Yeah.

What is your – like what is the relationship between the nature doc and learning? Because even when – as I'm listening to the facts, I know that they are slipping right out. I never pretend that I'm going to like – I don't think I've ever retained a single fact from a nature documentary is what I'm saying. I just don't have – for whatever reason, it's just like water over a stone. The stone being my smooth-ass brain. Yeah.

I mean, I think part of it is just if you go in, right, like we tend to learn, I think the three of us in this room, I'm just going to make a general statement about how we might learn best, probably through stories. Yes. Like if you were to sit there and watch a History Channel documentary about the Roman Empire, like you might glean some stuff, but are you going to remember, you know, the dates of Vespasian's reign? I kind of don't think you are upon leaving. But I do think that is one reason, and I'm sure we're going to discuss this, that documentaries like Mammals and Archeology

other documentaries in the Attenborough mold, tell stories about the animals that they're featuring so that we can kind of remember, almost like remember the animals as characters to try to learn something of what their behavior is. And this time I did focus in more on that. Right. I mean, I think, yeah, Alex, I agree with you completely about the kind of like the narrative –

A narrative's ability to help us learn and help us retain knowledge. I think with mammals...

I, at least, and I don't know about you guys, gravitate towards the animals that I have a sympathetic feeling towards. And that's kind of what I retain. Howler monkeys? Were you into the howlers? I like the howlers. I was thinking specifically—

I was thinking about the otters in Singapore. Oh, yes. One of the otters, it's a pack because they live in packs. And this particular pack goes kind of like running around the city. And one of them is left behind after the whole family crosses a road except him. His calls are drowned out by the sounds of the city. ♪

He revisits places along the family's regular route. But he's always too late. Even his family's scent is masked by the smells of city life.

And so, of course, I was like, will Otter find Mommy? There's the story. I will remember this because I felt sympathetic towards Mr. Otter, who was, you know, looked sleek and intelligent, but also a bit helpless.

And so I think with nature documentaries, you know, there's the question of anthropomorphizing these creatures and kind of gravitating towards, like, are you a cheetah or are you an antelope? Yeah. You know? Yeah. Yeah. But what you said, Nomi, like, it's so true to me, too. Like, the way that they're able—and I think this is just because of, first of all, the amazing, like—

way that these cameras move and everything to immediately give a sort of protagonism to an animal and to like follow their story like a drama. It's kind of terrifying. Well, there are dramas, though, you know. OK, so first of all, I just want to say I loved this series. I loved it.

Like, if you guys didn't love it, tell me about why you didn't love it. But I was totally into it. I mean, it had all the hallmarks of things that I come to nature documentaries for. First of all, the footage, as you were saying, Vincent –

It's splendid. It's stunning. It's stunning. There's moments where I was like, is this CGI? Which, of course, it isn't. It isn't. And what's cool is that at the end of each episode, they show you some of how they made the episode. And, you know, for instance, there was a really amazing –

where they show this crazy thing, which is that bottlenose dolphins and this other species of dolphins called false killer whales, because they look a bit like orcas, their skull is kind of similar to the skull of orcas, have actually formed an interspecies friendship, which is very, very, very rare. These two groups are old acquaintances. In the waters around New Zealand, they are almost always found together.

And then we see this amazing thing where the bottlenose dolphins start to herd a school of tiny fish up to the surface of the ocean so that they can eat them. And they're like forming this big, gorgeous ball as they swim higher and higher and the dolphins are having a field day eating them. But despite helping, the whales don't appear to feed. For them, the Kahawai are just the bait.

They are in it for the bigger fish that those little fish lure. And then at the end of the episode, we see how this was all filmed. The scientists are out in their boat. First, they have to look for the group of whales. They're like, finally, they find them. It's very exciting. Oh, my God. Yeah. It's promising. I've seen a zombie nose. Oh, my God.

They're trying to stick a camera on one using this kind of like it's like one of those things that you use at the supermarket to like get the toilet paper from the upper shelf. They use this kind of long branch. The bounty roll. Yes. Like they use this bounty roll branch to stick this sensor on the false killer whales. And that's how we learned for the first time ever that they share their food, all this stuff. Here's my way over towards them. Okay, this is it.

We did it! We did it! We did it! Well done! That very long example honestly made me feel, and maybe this is the bigger point, that humans have this huge responsibility but also ability to be custodians to nature as well. I'm so happy. Yeah, I do think what you're leading us to, Alex, is talking about the political angle of the show, right? Because...

Over the years, it hasn't always been the case that, you know, these types of shows were like trying to tell us something about what we should do, what kind of custodians should we be to planet Earth.

But recent years, of course, because of the hastening, you know, potential demise of this planet has kind of changed the attitude of nature documentaries towards this topic, you know, and the urgency of it. And this show does show us ways in which the environmental situation has been affecting these animals. But I agree with you that even just the fact that this is still happening

This kind of documentary is still being shot and these resources are still being kind of earmarked for the benefit of such shows. And of course, these shows are moneymakers as well. You know, they're entertainment, they're popular. But the commitment of the people involved...

Which we can see in these segments towards the end of the episodes where it shows how hard it is to get this footage and the knowledge and perseverance it takes to capture these things so we can learn more about the world is really kind of hope-making and inspiring. In a minute, a message for our dolphin friends. Oh, boy.

That's in a minute. That just rolled off your tongue. That was amazing. I'm semi-fluent. How did you know? I studied abroad.

Hi, this is David Remnick. I'm proud to share the news that three films from the New Yorker documentary series have been shortlisted for the Academy Awards. And they are Incident, Seat 31, Zoe Zephyr, and Eternal Father. And they all immerse you in the finest cinematic journalism, exploring themes of justice, identity, and the bonds that shape us.

These extraordinary films, which were created by established filmmakers as well as emerging artists, will inform, challenge, and move you. I encourage you to watch them along with our full slate of documentary and narrative films at newyorker.com slash video. Okay, I think one thing that we...

Might want to talk about is just kind of how the tone and the aim of Nature Docs has changed over the decades. So I'm going to play for us some old school Attenborough. Ooh. Some OG Attenborough. Take us back. After an hour, I found on the forest floor the rinds and cores of durian fruit, which I knew was the favorite food of the Orang-Utans.

I showed it to the diac who had come with me, and he confirmed what I had hoped. The way in which it had been chewed showed that it had been eaten by an orangutan. One must have been here early this morning. Okay, so we're seeing a young David Attenborough in black and white. We're seeing this kind of journey. They're looking for this orangutan. A few minutes later, we heard a crashing in the branches ahead.

And there, only a few yards away, we spotted a great, furry red form swaying in the trees. And now we are seeing footage of the orangutan, which for the time, I think, was probably extraordinary. I mean, the show Zoo Quest was hugely, hugely successful. And, you know, many, many people tuned in. And I can see why from this. Like, you're seeing an orangutan climbing in the trees. Yes.

By the way, the first thing I noticed when I watched this clip is how focused on the people it is. It's very, very different than contemporary nature documentaries where the people are totally out of sight. That's right. We're seeing this kind of journey that Attenborough is making in the thick force of – I'm not sure where he is. It's Bali? It's Bali? Okay. Is it Bali? Probably. I mean, it's certainly an Asian country. Yeah, yeah. Is it Bali? I believe it's – yeah, I believe it's Bali. So we're seeing him and –

therefore a Balinese guide, they're looking for this orangutan. And we see them, first of all, like when Attenborough's asking if the orangutan has been sleeping there or something, he makes the kind of international gesture for sleep. You know, it's like we're almost watching this kind of funny communication between guide and presenter. Right. It's not just the footage of the animal divorced.

Right. Right.

We see Attenborough experiencing a traditional Balinese dance. Soon, a dancer wearing a headdress of hornbill feathers emerged from beneath the longhouse and began to prance and posture to the music of the drums and gongs. You know, this is 1956. This is post-Empire, right? But not... Just post. But just post-Empire. Yeah. And the... And not fully post. We're moving post. Yeah, we're moving post.

Trending post. We're trending post.

And yet there is a kind of, I mean, the kind of interest in a strange land and showing the people back home through the, you know, with the help of the BBC, not just the animals, but also the people and the customs. And then also, you know, this is called Zoo Quest. So interestingly, I believe from what I read about this show is

the idea was to bring back those animals to the London Zoo. And so it wasn't just let us observe these animals in their natural habitat and leave them alone, but the impulse to kind of like bring back these specimen animals

Back to the mother country. You know, that, of course, is quite different than what we see right now in a nature documentary. Although arguably the images that are brought back from these far flung places kind of satisfy a similar impulse in the viewer. Acquisitive. Yeah. Yeah. It strikes me, though, too, that.

The authority and the, I don't know, the equity that Attenborough builds up from ZooQuest on forward as somebody who actually cares about these habitats. Yeah. Cares about how they are depicted in this whole sort of prismatic way is what gives him then the sort of,

as a person to then make the turn toward what we see now, which is a more, I guess you could call it a more activist form or certainly at least a more sort of politically aware form. So one of the real turning points for Attenborough was in 2004,

when he went to a talk. He, like many people at that time, was already aware of global warming. But this talk is really the moment in the Attenborough lore when he was convinced that humans were behind these major changes. So let's play a clip from the first project that he made after seeing that talk. This is 2006, a program called Are We Changing Planet Earth?

You and I belong to the most widespread and dominant species of animal on Earth.

27 years ago, I presented Life on Earth, a series that traced the evolution of life from its very beginnings. What we're about to see, if you keep playing the clip, you'll see, because I watched a bit of this before, maybe we can keep watching for a second, because he's playing a clip of himself as a younger man talking about humans' effect on nature, and what he comes back to say is an older man is even stronger. But although denying a special place in the world may be becoming immodest...

The fact remains that man has an unprecedented control over the world and everything in it. And so, whether he likes it or not, what happens next is very largely up to him. So that's the old documentary. And now we see in the new documentary, the immediate cut is to a vision of glaciers collapsing, huge forest fires, just real disaster footage. Up to us, indeed.

At the time I spoke those words, I had no idea that we, mankind, might have unleashed forces that are now altering the climate of the Earth. Could the destruction of towns and cities in the southern United States be linked to the collapse of glaciers in Greenland? And we cut also... Big storms. You know, keep in mind, this was 2006. Oh, Katrina, yes. We cut to Hurricane Katrina, yes. I love hurricanes.

Everything is gone. People's furniture and stuff floating around is real bad. Might drought in the Amazon that killed thousands of fish be connected to the intensity of forest fires in Australia? So here is basically the most powerful direct statement that Attenborough can give saying, well, I said 27 years ago that humankind was going to have an effect on the environment.

And we had to see what it was going to be. Well, here it is. We absolutely now know that it's climate change. I mean, this is a really forceful program. It's interesting to me that it's even phrased as a question, are we changing planet Earth? Like he really just sets up his audience and maybe that's the title he got away with or maybe he felt that that was a more inviting way to kind of get people because, of course, it was framed as a debate for so many years, this climate change debate program.

Quick bait before click bait. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, because you got to get the eyeballs. But here he is coming in saying that it's very, very real. I mean he focuses in this program on the polar bears, which are at the top of the Arctic food chain and are therefore deeply threatened by the failure of the species below them, all of which depend on ice flows being in place for a certain amount of the year. You know, the other thing that really strikes me about the show Are We Changing Planet Earth?

is unlike a show like Mammals or even just Planet Earth 2, the huge 2016 Attenborough blockbuster that I watched and enjoyed very much. In Are We Changing Planet Earth, there are a lot of conversations with scientists directly. Like the people are part of the footage in a really different way than in that earlier show Zoo Quest. It's no longer just –

wide-eyed, excited exploration and learning something new. It's now talking to experts who have studied these animal populations for dozens of years. So it's really trying to shine a light politically and scientifically on what is happening to the planet. That's right. And in Mammals, at the end of one of the episodes, we see the sort of search of the videography crew for the very cute animal.

Huge eared finnet fox. Oh, my God. Yeah, that's the dark episode. Yeah, and before they find them, they find two carcasses.

of foxes that have clearly been killed for sport, it seems. For sport, yeah. You know, there's no... They don't do anything with the meat or anything. They haven't taken the fur, the meat, nothing. They're just kind of there. And you can see the devastation of, you know, one of the guys just stands up and looks around and says, I'm heartbroken. Yes. But it's clear that human intervention is a certain sort of...

wanton cruelty or whatever as part of the story of their survival or not. I think it's in another episode the fishing is meager. The sea lions are familiar with the sound of these trolley wheels.

You see them under a bridge in the water, and you see a guy like a fishmonger rolling like a cart, like a supermarket cart, filled with fish, innards and bits, you know, whatever is left after filleting the fish for, you know, his customers. Leftovers from the markets are thrown back into the sea.

So there is a kind of... I mean, obviously it comes from a lack that is because of... Man-made, that's right. That's man-made. But there is a kind of...

Nice moment there of kind of like we're collaborating here in a way. Exactly. Yeah, I really felt that one big takeaway from mammals, you know, we've discussed in brief this kind of trajectory from happy observer of nature and the wonders of nature to much more forceful political commentator basically, still an observer of nature and therefore forced to speak the truth about what humankind is doing to nature.

One thing I got from Mammals was not pure doom. And I think that speaks to a very particular political and cultural moment because at this point, like most people I would venture to say who are going to view these shows are convinced that this is real and urgent. And so it's sort of like in 2006, you have the need to say, hey, this is real. Look at what's happening. Open your eyes to the absolute disaster. And now I think –

It's a bit of a cliche in our society to be like, well, we're screwed. And that is so both like emotionally despondent and also practically horrible, practically like really counterproductive. So I found that the series – and this is one reason I like the series – was kind of striking the balance between –

Exposure to the splendors of nature. OK, check. Exposure to some of the degradations that nature has faced because of man-made climate change. But also, as Nomi is pointing out, and there were other examples too, a sense of, you know what? There are some options here. We have choices to make. We need to keep thinking about these things in terms of – like a good example was there's one episode, the cold episode, where we see the snow leopard. And I basically like screamed when the snow leopard came out.

on screen because a couple of years ago I listened to Peter Matheson's book The Snow Leopard yes on audiobook and the whole thing there is about like

They try to see the snow leopard. It's very arduous. They don't see the snow leopard. I'm like, and in my own living room? Here's the snow leopard? Oh, my God. Like there she is. She's right there. And she's hunting yak who these Tibetan farmers are bringing up to plateau. And first you think like, oh, God, they're invading her territory. But then it turns out that there's been an effort made to preserve the snow leopard. There are more snow leopards. There's a kind of compensation program going on for the farmers who lose their yak so that they're not inclined to hunt the snow leopard.

So it just shows you, at least I took this away, and maybe I'm being too optimistic, but that there is something to be done. Right. That's right. In a minute, what's behind the so-called gold rush of nature documentaries? Critics at Large. We'll be right back.

Hi, I'm Susan Glasser. I'm Jane Mayer. And I'm Evan Osnos, and we host the Washington Roundtable from the New Yorker's Political Scene Podcast. For me, this is the water cooler. This is a wonderful chance to sit down with two of the smartest colleagues in

the country and, you know, just kind of compare notes. No, that's so true because first of all, we are actually friends in real life, but I can't wait until Fridays to hear what you guys think. Everybody sees the headlines, but you guys fill in the gaps. I also think, though, occasionally we get somebody to come on and I'm always smarter for it. If you get a great historian who can tell you about a presidential election 50, 60 years ago, often it can help you understand about what's happening today.

So if you're looking for weekly insights into what's going on inside the Beltway, please join us every Friday on The Washington Roundtable, part of the New Yorker's Political Scene Podcast. There's been a huge explosion of these big budget documentaries. I've seen it referred to in a few places as a gold rush or even, I guess, more appropriately as a stampede.

There was Blue Planet 2 in 2018, Our Planet on Netflix in 2019, A Life on Our Planet in 2020, and many, many more. Did you guys see The Octopus Teacher?

No. Okay. Did you? Yeah, because the octopus teacher is what immediately comes to mind as a recent, like, mega hit. It got everybody talking. It was on Netflix. It came out during the pandemic. Is that the one where there was, like, a romance involving an octopus or some other sort of— Well, it's funny you should ask that. So, okay, I'm realizing now it's called My Octopus Teacher, which makes my point even better.

It's a hard thing to explain, but sometimes you just get a feeling and you know there's something with this creature that's very unusual. There's something to learn here. I had to have a radical change in my life. And the only way I knew to do it was to be in this ocean with her. And then I had this crazy idea. What happens if I just went every day?

filmmaker and naturalist Craig Foster, he has taught himself to swim underwater without any...

He began freediving in a cold underwater kelp forest. When he went down there, he found his octopus teacher, this female octopus who he films and watches as she defends herself against pajama sharks, for instance. There's a very scary moment where she loses an arm. This guy develops phlegm.

what are clearly feelings for this octopus. Like, I'll leave it up to you to decide whether they're romantic feelings, but they're deep feelings of profound attachment. I mean, it just came to my mind as part of this gold rush situation where there clearly is a hunger to see nature documentaries. I mean, that one had, like, yeah, it was a rom-com. I mean, it doesn't end well. Let's just...

Spoiler alert, like octopus doesn't make it. So maybe it was a wrong dram? Yeah, it was a bit like, you know, love story but with an octopus instead of a cancerous, you know, Harvard student. Love means never having to say you're sorry to an octopus. Yeah, or saying it for the rest of your life because you couldn't do enough to protect her. Oh, no. I mean another answer to the question about why these documentaries are everywhere is

I like to go for the easiest answer sometimes, the cameras. The cameras are really good right now. We have like a real ability to capture stuff we've never seen before. And it seems to keep growing. I mean, that's just what else can you guys think of? Like that's just one. Yeah. I mean, I just think, you know, these documentaries present us differently.

with a vision of a different world. I remember suddenly watching and enjoying this show on Netflix called Penguin Town, which is about penguin protagonists in South Africa, in a particular town, and how they live in love, which had kind of like a scent of reality television to it. So it's not totally surprising that I liked it.

And these are all different types of shows and documentaries. But I think it does – to go back to this reality show comparison, right? Part of the reason that people watch reality television is escapism. Even though the protagonists that we –

Yeah.

Because I'm eating octopus, then this octopus is dying or whatever. I don't know about this particular octopus because I haven't watched it. But you know what I mean. And yet it's separate from us, you know? And there is something about that that does provide a level of escapism and kind of – I don't know if relaxation is exactly the word I'm looking for. But comfort maybe? Yeah.

Yeah. And I do think part of that comfort is bound up with the idea that some of this stuff still exists. Like that's where we come back to this loop. Yeah. Which hopefully isn't a doom loop because I don't think that is productive. No. Yeah. But this loop of we watch these things relieved that some of –

The magnificence, much of the magnificence of the planet is still there. And then it becomes the responsibility of these shows to remind us that that all depends on our behavior and to insert examples of ways in which that's no longer the case. I noticed I was taking a look before at Our Planet on Netflix. And as I started to watch it, I saw that it was rated TVPG for fear.

I thought, OK, well, interesting. I guess the fear must be because there will be hunting scenes and like maybe, you know, I had actually started watching mammals with my 18 month old son who identified most of the four legged ones as doggies. So he's not totally at the level of understanding what's happening. And then at some point he got bored and wanted to do something else. And I was like, well, good that you did, because you didn't have to see the whale pups hunting.

get, you know, knocked off one by one. Like, there's some brutal stuff that's going on. So maybe that's the fear they met. But the fear I was thinking of, of course, was the fear of extinction. Something, you know, all that I totally agree with. And I also wonder sometimes, because I don't necessarily think that the streaming services have a high estimation of their viewers. And I do wonder if the sort of

sometimes ambient nature. This has been a topic among sort of watchers, observers of TV recently. People are trying to create what they call, you know, ambient TV so that you can just have on or second screen TV. Right, right, right. While you can like be on your phone. True device watch or something. That's right. You can be on your phone and this thing is on also. And I wonder if

You know, because it seems like these things are very expensive to make. Like, you know, not only the technology, which we talked about, but just the sending people on these immense voyages. I think it's a fool's errand to try to, you know, excavate the profit motives of Netflix or whatever. But I do hope that what might be a cynical –

ploy on the behalf of the streamers might redound to our benefit in the ways that we have talked about. One thing that I've heard, and I think it's funny, is the idea that

marijuana legalization has something to do with this. 100%. The friend of our show who has been on our show, Samantha Irby, has an essay that's like, sometimes I like to get high and think about whales. There it is. And she's not the only one. And I do want, you know, sort of, I wonder too if this has to do with, again, the powers that be and their estimation of

Which is like I want to blitz out and look at something beautiful. You don't even have to wonder. Like we have evidence that indeed it is the case. Like there was this Times article in which a BBC executive said that one reason that this stuff is becoming so popular is the legalization of marijuana. People want to get high and not just think about whales. They want to look at them. They want to check them out. Yeah. And I actually think that's great.

Like I think that's a great use of nature documentaries and of weed because – Both natural resources or both. Yes. And, you know, that kind of stoned focus and also awe and wonder is appropriate to bring. Yeah.

Because those things are awesome. You know what else is awesome? It's a net positive. You know what else is awesome and a net positive? David Attenborough himself. Do we have Attenborough thoughts? Yes. What does he mean to us? He's 97 now, I believe. 98. Wow. He was just out and about at Wimbledon.

Looking dapper and fine. Yeah. Well, I think, you know, we've talked about this on the show before, but we three like to find examples of vocation of someone who is clearly called to do something and did it and pursued it with love and

He's one of these people you can look at and say, you have given us such an enormous amount. You have added net hugely positive to the human condition, which is understanding ourselves in the context of the globe, of the world. Yeah, and I think this is really – I mean if we were to sum up kind of the legacy of this genre, not that it's by any means – it seems to still be going strong. So we're not – the discussion is yet to be had. Yeah.

But does knowing about something make us care about it more? Is being exposed to the world in this particular way that these nature documentaries have been able to give us, does it make us more involved members of society, of planet Earth, of, you know, whatever you want to call it, members of our species? Yeah.

I think the answer to that is that it could. And it depends on the people who are watching. I think it could. But I think like the most significant effect perhaps would be like, you know, the trope, which I love of like the theater kid watching the Tonys and being like, that's for me. It's Broadway. Get me there. This is my place. I'm getting on the next train, pops. Like that kid is watching these documentaries too. Yeah.

And a new generation of scientists are born. I do believe that's the case. And I think that's very important. And as for the rest of us schmoes who are not about to go off and get PhDs in this – I'm packing my bags. Yeah. I'm heading off to the next research station. I'll see you in 10 years when I'm back from Antarctica. Yeah. I do think it matters. Like –

I think this grim but true thing, which is that these documentaries serve as a preservation of something that may never be again. Which is a terrible thought. In that case, I think we should be deeply glad to have them and like treasure them. I'm hoping that the legacy of them is that we as a public feel more committed to our planet's future. I mean, I feel so like –

I'm not Pollyannish because I'm exactly the opposite about the subject of the climate, but I feel like I'm playing that role here, just being like, maybe we can all care a little more. No, I do think, you know, as someone who really – I don't really watch nature documentaries regularly, but as I said, you know, in the beginning of the episode, as I watched, I was like –

Earth is amazing, which sounds stupid, but I do think it's like, wait, there's a whole world out there. I mean, similarly to when we went to Seattle with the pod and we were talking to people on the Space Needle and there were people from all over. Everyone was kind of helpful and intelligent and, you know, willing to talk to strangers. And I was like –

wow, the human race. Not so bad after all. You know? Yeah. But also the worst. This has been Critics at Large. Our senior producer is Rhiannon Corby and Alex Barish is our consulting editor. Our executive producer is Stephen Valentino. Condé Nast's head of global audio is Chris Bannon.

Alexis Quadrato composed our theme music, and we had engineering help today from James Yost with mixing by Mike Kutchman. You can find every episode of Critics at Large at newyorker.com slash critics. We'll see you next week. Sometimes in television, the wildest drama happens off camera. Based on original Vanity Fair reporting, Anatomy of Lies is a gripping three-part series that examines the rise and fall of Grey's Anatomy writer Elizabeth Finch, whose lies fooled Hollywood and her friends and family for years.

Finch captivated audiences with stories of survival and resilience, but the truth behind her carefully crafted image was far darker. As her lies unraveled, so did the lives of those who trusted her. All episodes are now streaming on Peacock. From PR.