PBS goes Green: public broadcaster lands Sir David Attenborough’s ‘The Green Planet’ for a US audience.

“Public television has an important role, and I look forward to all that we will do moving forward,” PBS CEO and president Paula Kerger told journalists today during a Zoom teleconference on behalf of the US’s public broadcaster.

Kerger’s words were carefully calibrated to the UK government’s announcement over the weekend that it’s ending the BBC’s licence fee earlier than expected, and will take a hard look at public funding for the BBC in the near future.

PBS has been embraced by larger audiences during Covid lockdowns and, perhaps more importantly, has shown itself to be one of the few mainstream broadcasters resilient enough to hold its own against streaming services  such as Netflix and Disney+ during the pandemic.

If anything, Kerger is “doubling down” — her words — on programming other broadcasters can’t or won’t produce.

To that end Kerger announced that PBS has landed the exclusive US rights to The Green Planet, Sir David Attenborough’s critically acclaimed five-part nature series about plant life. 

The Green Planet has already debuted to a UK audience — ironically on the very same beleaguered public broadcaster that the UK government is determined to cut — to near-record numbers and widespread acclaim.

Kerger was guarded in her comments about BBC’s latest s, saying simply that the world’s public broadcasters work together on numerous projects and PBS in particular enjoys bipartisan support from both conservative and liberal politicans in the US Congress. Though they are both public broadcasters, PBS and BBC are notably different in both content and in funding. PBS has traditionally prided itself on being a source of news and information programming, and not entertainment.

The Green Planet is an audacious and ambitious move on PBS’s part. 

Attenborough’s high-profile documentarty programs have traditionally been shown to US audiences by BBC America, now owned by the AMC group of networks; Discovery Channel, part of the Discovery Networks group of worldwide channels; and in Canada by BBC Earth, a relatively new streaming service across Canada. Another Attenborough series, Our Planet, was produced and streams exclusively on Netflix.

The Green Planet will debut on PBS in July. It’s an auspicious occasion for the Attenborough program because PBS, being a public broadcaster, is available in every home in the US with a TV. BBC America, Discovery and others use the cable/streaming model, and so reach a smaller, more niche segment of the audience. By airing on PBS, The Green Planet is poised to become the most watched Attenborough nature program in US history.

The Green Planet builds on “our rich legacy of science and natural history programming that is committed to addressing issues around conservation and climate change,” Kerger told writers during her morning announcement. “The Green Planet is a deeply immersive portrtayal of the world of plants, which are the backbone of our ecosystem. Not only is the content compelling; it’s visually stunning. It’s groundbreaking, too, with new filming techniques and caerma rigs that were specifically invented for this project to capture plant behaviour.”

The Green Planet is both a cornerstone and a signal of PBS’s increased emphasis on science and nature programming during the next weeks and months, Kerger added. PBS’ long-running science program NOVA is prepping a program about Arctic sinkholes, and PBS’s multiple Emmy-winning news program Frontline is readying a three-part program about the link between climate change and the fossil fuel industry.

“We’re here to bring light to the beauty and fragility or our planet,” Kerger said.

‘Planet Earth’ producer Alastair Fothergill and Disneynature Films embark on a 15-year journey of discovery for the Earth Day film ‘Polar Bear’

Alastair Fothergill had been there before, of course, as the series co-producer of Frozen Planet and Planet Earth, but this time was different. 

Polar Bear,  the family film about a mother polar bear and her young cubs exploring their wintery world for the first time, will be one of the anchors of Disney+’s 2022 Earth Day programming, and it was always supposed that Polar Bear would play to Disney’s traditional family audience for nature films. 

The British-born Fothergill was, after all, the producer of the Disneynature film Earth, which was released in movie theatres, along with the follow-ups African Cats and Chimpanzee.

Polar Bear, the film Fothergill set out to make, was not the film he made in the end, though. It still has the family-friendly signature marks familiar to anyone who’s seen a Disney nature film, but this time there’s an edge.

Climate change — or, more accurately, the climate crisis — is reshaping the polar bear’s natural habitat in ways that are both pronounced and profound. The ice melt across the Arctic is more dramatic and happening more quickly than even the most pessimistic projections, and scientists are increasingly concerned about the future survival of the polar region’s apex predator.

In a teleconference call Friday with TV writers and fellow explorers, Fothergill and Polar Bear co-producer Jeff Wilson sounded a note of, if not alarm exactly, disquiet.

What’s happening in the planet’s northernmost regions is already having an effect on the bears’ behaviour, and Fothergill worries about the bears’ prospects in a world where hunting seals on polar ice — seals being bears’ primary source of protein that allows them to withstand winter’s increasingly volatile temperature swings — may no longer be viable.

Bears need ice to reach the seals. If they can’t reach the seals, they can’t hunt the seals. And if they can’t hunt the seals, they starve.

Fothergill is no wet-behind-the-ears dilettante when it comes to nature filmmaking. He majored in zoology at the UK’s Universities of St. Andrews and Durham and joined the BBC’s Natural History Unit in 1983. It was there that he met his mentor and lifelong filmmaking collaborator David Attenborough; he worked on Attenborough’s The Trials of Life in 1990 Fothergill was appointed head of the Natural History Unit just two years later, in 1992. By the end of the decade, though, Fothergill stepped down from administrative duties to focus on producing programs: The Blue Planet, Planet Earth, Frozen Planet and The Hunt followed in quick succession. Fothergill executive-produced Netflix’s landmark Our Planet in 2019, and Attenborough’s autobiographical follow-up, A Life on Our Planet.

Our Planet featured Attenborough’s by now familiar narration and Planet Earth’s narrative style, but it was very different from its predecessors. This time, was on the effects of climate change, human predation on the world’s increasingly fragile ecosystems and looming species extinction.

Polar Bear follows in a similar vein to other Disneynature films, but it’s impossible to make a film about polar bears in this day and age and not focus on their environment. For that reason Fothergill and his co-producer Jeff Wilson opted to tell the story from the vantage point of a mother bear looking back on her 15 years of life in the far North while trying to raise her own cubs to adulthood.

“The reduction in sea ice that we’ve seen over the last 15 years has been dramatic,” Fothergill said. “Polar bears will the first of the A-list of stars in the natural world who may become extinct because of global warming.”

The story always determines what ends up on film in the end, he said, and the story of polar bears is increasingly becoming a story of survival. Advances in camera technology have made nature stories easier to tell — but the stories themselves have become more complex and emotionally demanding.

Biodiversity is not just a buzzphrase. The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic shows that the human biome is regulated the same way the biosphere is regulated, Fothergill said: Everything is connected.

In a strange way, Covid-19 has forced people to realize how connected we are to the natural world, and how easily a disease can be transmitted around the world. It’s not just about polar bears. Polar bears are a symbol, though, because they are one of the most recognizable, familiar animals on the planet.

They also make good material for storytelling.

“The thing about polar bears is they’re probably the ultimate loner, of all the animals you can imagine,” Fothergill said. “They’ll often go for years and years without meeting another bear. The thing about mother bears is they have babies that stay with them for two or three years, and polar bear cubs are possibly the cutest animals on the planet.

“Jeff and I decided very early on that our story would not be just two or three years of a mother brining up one set of cubs. It would be the memories of a 15-year-old bear, looking back from the day she was born until she reached 15.

“That decision was based on the fact that it would allow us to look at global warming changes over that time period. We made the film in Svalbard, just 700 miles south of the North Pole. Over the4 last 10 tom 15 years there has been significant change. That’s why we went for the 15-year narrative.”

Polar Bear streams on Disney+ starting April 22.

Alastair Fothergill

Pixabay

Phil Keoghan: ‘The Amazing Race’ is Back On a Wing and a Prayer … Literally

“The world is waiting,” Phil Keoghan used to say at the start of every Amazing Race, but even he could not have anticipated the wait for Amazing Race’s 33rd season — stopped in mid-race nearly two years ago by the SARS CoV-2 coronavirus, later dubbed COVID-19.

Keoghan and Amazing Race producers Elise Doganieri and Bertram van Munster waited it out, even when the long wait seemed a fool’s errand — a life-saving vaccine, followed by a deadly variant, followed by another variant, followed by booster vaccines, followed by an even more transmissible variant — and yet, in the end, the wait paid off. This past Wednesday The Amazing Race returned to home viewers, slightly retooled and considerably more world-wise. 

After 20 years and 32 trips around the world, more than 600 “Racers” have tested their mettle against the clock, airline schedules and the capriciousness of fate and ill timing. Over the years The Amazing Race raced across 90 countries, but there were times in the past year when it must have seemed as if just one more country might prove a bridge too far.

And yet, here we are  — 11 new teams  embarked on the journey of a lifetime, and in the end one team made it all the way through to first place. The milestone season that began in February, 2020 finally crossed the finish line and made it onto the air in January, 2022. In a teleconference call from his backyard garden in New Zealand, Keoghan — looking no worse for wear — joking referred to the 18-month hiatus as the longest pit stop in the show’s history. It was no accident that one of this season’s early pitstops was in London’s Natural History Museum, beneath the gargantuan skeleton of a blue whale, not far from the marble bust of Charles Darwin and next door to the stately home of the Royal Geographical Society, founded in 1830 bySir Francis Beaufort and the ill-fated polar explorer Sir John Franklin.

Freezing to death in polar ice was the furthest thing from Keoghan’s mind when the 33rd season of Amazing Race resumed; he was simply happy to get the Race running again.

“When we started 20 years ago, it was mind-blowing,” Keoghan recalled. “I'll always be thankful to Bertram and Elise for coming up with a great idea that fit right in with my passion for travel and people. I would never have believed that we would still be here 20 years later, with a show that feels as fresh as the day we started. It's never the same. I think if I was doing a studio show, and I was going in and doing the same thing over and over again, rinsing and repeating the same formula over and over again, I would definitely have gone stale on the idea.

“But Amazing Race has never felt that way. Honestly, it feels maybe more relevant today than it was even 20 years ago. It was groundbreaking 20 years ago, and I think it continues to push boundaries all these years later. I love being a part of something  that seems to have has resonated with the audience. And those audiences seemed  absolutely desperate for us to get back. They have been waiting for the world, and thankfully we're able to give it to them again.”

That’s not to say running The Amazing Race in the age of COVID was easy.

“You live, you learn, you adapt, and you try to make the best of the situation,” Keoghan said quietly. “I think what we've tried to do is embrace the changes and find a way to use use them to our advantage.

“We just rolled with the challenges of shooting during COVID. And as Elise said, we managed to get everybody back safely, which has been our number one priority from day one, and still is today.”

Running The Amazing Race in the age of COVID had its compensations. The production chartered its own plane, for one, a Boeing 757. No more squabbles at airline counters over seating availability. With the airline industry in utter chaos — it still is — using their own plane eliminated the need to work around cancelled flights. It’s taken away one of Amazing Race’s more familiar elements — teams scrambling to be on the first available flights and vault to the front of the line — but there were practicalities involved.

“It was comfortable,” Keoghan admitted. “We didn't have to stand in long lines, all those things you don't see on the show, but are very taxing on all of us. We didn't have to deal with that, so that was kind of … yeah, it was a welcome change.”

In the end, any season of The Amazing Race — even a COVID-affected season — comes down to the teams in the Race.

“Casting has done a fantastic job over the years of just having really dynamic, memorable teams,” Keoghan said. “And ultimately, if we don't have good teams, we don't have a good show.

“No matter how good the challenges are, no matter how well we shoot it, no matter what we do, if we don't have good teams, we don't have a show.”

The Amazing Race’s 33rd race around the world is airing Wednesdays on CBS and streaming on Paramount+. 

Penn Holderness, Kim Holderness - Screengrab/CBS ©2021

Michael Norwood, Armonde “Moe” Badger - Screengrab/CBS ©2021

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'Welcome to Earth's Message for All Humankind

Will Smith is guide and guest  at the centre of Welcome to Earth, Disney+’s six-episode special event docuseries about the hidden wonders of our blue and green planet.

The world-recognized movie star is also a part-time guinea pig, as National Geographic explorers shepherd him to the bottom of the sea, beyond the Arctic Circle to the North Pole, up an active volcano and across the green hills of Africa as part of a larger mission to explain to Smith — and by extension viewers looking on through their mobile screens and watching from home — such big-picture concepts as how we see colour, and the nature of fear and how it conditions some of us to be risk averse and others to constantly push the boundaries of what’s possible and discover the unknown. Explorers, in other words.

And it was National Geographic explorers Eric Weihenmayer, mountaineer; engineer Albert Lin, expeditionist Dwayne Fields and marine biologist Diva Amon  who seized the spotlight during a recent teleconference to promote Welcome to Earth’s streaming debut this week on Disney+. It was the explorers themselves who in many ways had the most interesting stories to tell, about how they became latter-day adventurers in the New Age of Exploration, and where they see themselves going from here — as scientists, adventurers and everyday human beings confronted by the big-picture issues that confront humankind in the age of Covid, climate change and looming species extinction.

Weihenmayer, an athlete, adventurer and activist who became the first blind person to reach the summit of Mt. Everest, on May 25, 2001, was humbled to even be asked to participate in the series, by series producer Jane Root — a former BBC executive instrumental in shepherding many of David Attenborough’s natural history series to fruition — and Academy Award-nominated film director Darren Aronofsky.

“I was excited to be invited to be one of the explorers, not being able to see, because I think it’s a real celebration that we experience the world and discover things not just with our eyes but with our sense of touch, our hearing, and our sense of smell. For me, it was a beautiful experience to go in and be the vehicle to understanding the world in a non-visual way, even though I know the show is insanely visual.”

Lin, a research scientist at the University of California San Diego and a National Geographic Emerging Explorer in the field of technology-enabled exploration, concurred.

“The things we take for granted in this world are just beyond our view. This journey allowed us to experience concepts as fundamental as time, patterns, the kind of things we see around us in the natural world but perhaps don’t know much about. We were able to pull them apart in these unbelievably epic ways and see things we didn’t even realize were there. For me, as a technologist who’s applied that to different aspects of my own world, applying these things made me realize that this world of ours is so much more incredible than I ever realized. And so connected. The different dots of how it all works are connected. We’re in this beautiful, wonderful, blue dot, floating across the universe in a kind of a magical way.”

Amon, a marine biologist from Trinidad who takes centre-stage in Welcome to Earth’s premiere episode, as she accompanies Smith on a deep-sea dive, a voyage literally to the bottom of the sea, was delighted to show off her private world to the actor who appeared in I Am Legend and  was Oscar-nominated for Ali and The Pursuit of Happyness. 

“Welcome to Earth” was Smith’s most memorable lines in the Hollywood blockbuster Independence Day, and producer Jane Root said the choice was a natural fit for the docuseries. 

Amon is also a Marie Sklodowska Curie Research Fellow at London’s Natural History Museum, and remarks in the program that few marine explorers are people of colour like herself. She hails from Trinidad originally, and says it’s one of her regrets that as an island nation, Trinidad has been unable to afford marine research in its own territorial waters, a situation she has devoted her career to addressing.

“Welcome to Earth inspires us all to take stock and remind us to reconnect with nature,” she said, “and inspires us to be better stewards of this incredible planet.”

Dwayne Fields, a presenter of the BBC program Countryfile and the first Black person from Britain to reach the North Pole, said for his part that it was inspiring to be part of program dedicated to showcasing the beauty of the world around us.

“In doing so I’m hoping it will spark some, I don’t know, passion which will encourage everyone to want to get out there and see it, and experience it for themselves — whether that’s the same way as Erik, for example, by feeling, smelling, touching, or just immersing yourself in it.

“That’s the great thing about how this was shot and the people who shot it. They were the best people in the world using some of the best tech that was designed purely for this. It’’s such an immersive experience, and I feel it’s going to encourage more and more people to go out there and feel it for themselves.”

Welcome to Earth involved 92 film shoots in 34 countries, Root added.

“It’s all about these hidden worlds that are all around us. It’s about being filled with awe for this planet.”

“I love the outdoors,” Weihenmayer explained. “First and foremost, I love it! I love the experience, the sensory view of it through my hands, through my ears. I also realize there’s a side-benefit, how it’s motivational when a blind guy climbs big, tall mountains and kayaks rivers. There’s a wonderful, broader message there.

“We went to Vanuatu, which is this island chain, and we hiked up to this very active volcano, one of the most active volcanoes in the world. We had a good safety crew around us, so we felt pretty safe. For sure, though, it was wild because we were walking up this active volcano, with these giant magma bombs that were shooting half a mile into the sky. We repelled down into that volcano to study the soundscape of the volcano, and it was definitely, let’s say, counterintuitive to be walking into the volcano versus running away from it.

“Will was totally awesome about it. He’s a gamer. He was fine.”

The Jamaican-born Fields t found himself shepherding Smith through the cold, Frozen Planet-style.

“It was cold,” Fields admitted. “When you’re born on a sunny Caribbean island like Jamaica, it’s not the natural thing to say, ‘I’m going to get up and walk to the North Pole.’ As with anyone else, I wanted more out of life, though. All of us here wanted to do more, see more, and be more. I wanted that experience, and I saw that exact same thing in Will on this shoot. He wanted the experience. I think that’s exactly what the outdoors gives you.

“For me, the North Pole was completely abstract to everything I grew up seeing and being around. It was a great way to reinvent myself.”

The world doesn’t begin and end with Welcome to Earth.

“My checklist is a mile long,” Weihenmayer said, when asked to talk about his bucket list. “If you have maybe an hour, we can sit here over a beer and I’ll tell you all the things I still want to do with my life.

“Climb the north face of the Eiger; explore beautiful, huge rock faces and glaciers throughout Canada; go to Patagonia. I mean, for sure, I’ll run out of cartilage before I run out of things to do and things to explore.”

“For me, I think it’d have to be ice diving,” Amon said. “There’s just so much life down there, and yet on top of it it’s freezing cold. I just feel it would be challenging in every sense.”

“I’m taking a group to Antarctica next year,” Fields said. “A group of young people to Antarctica. You’re one of the young people. Wicked, wicked.

“I think it has to be somewhere where there are very few people, but there are some people. So I’m thinking the Gobi Desert. Like Albert, having watched the show, I’d probably say Vanuatu, or somewhere in Namibia. I can’t decide. That’s an unfair question.”

Welcome to Earth is streaming now, on Disney+. 

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