"Don’t talk to me about ‘Yellowstone’!” — Wyoming rancher Tara Miller

The PBS Nature documentary American Horses, airing Wednesday on PBS (8/7c, and on the PBS app),  spends a considerable amount of its hour-long running time tailing Wyoming ranchers Tara Miller and Mike Miller as they wrangle quarter horses on their property high on the Rocky Mountain plain, but mere mention of the Paramount Network TV western Yellowstone, recently renewed for a fifth season, is enough to give Tara Miller conniptions.

Yellowstone tells the multi-generational tale of a sprawling cattle ranch in Montana and the Dutton clan, who face simmering conflicts that oftern boil over, conflicts with the denizens of a nearby Native American reservation and a long parade of rapacious — and ruthless — and developers. It’s a life that, superficially anyway, appears to mirror that of the real-life Miller clan, but Tara Miller, for one, is having none of it.

The aggregate review website Rotten Tomatoes notes Yellowstone holds a 53% approval rating among critics — those wieners — based on 49 reviews, though it’s considerably more popular among regular viewers. The site’s critical consesnus of Yellowstone’s first season (the reviews have improved somewhat over the intervening years and seasons) reads, “Yellowstone proves too melodramatic to be taken seriously, diminshing the effect of the talented cast and beauitful backdrops.”

‘Melodramatic” ain’t the half ot it, Miller suggested toward the end of a Zoom teleconference call with TV critics to promote PBS Nature’s more sober, even-tempered — and realistic — documentary program American Horses. 

Yellowstone features quarter horses prominently — the same breed the Millers work with for a living — in many of its storylines.

“I couldn’t hear you,” Miller said, “because the phone was ringing. “I think you were talking about Yellowstone. That show makes me embarrassed to be a rancher because it is so phony.”

Don’t get her started, in other words — but she got started anyway.

“Those horses in the show aren’t really the quarter horses most ranchers are going to get,” she continued. “We know the people that are training those horses in the show. Those horses — they’re elite training horses. They are a trained cow horse.”

A cow horse is so named because it’s trained to herd cows, often by instinct.

“Mike does train cow horses, but that’s not generally what we use on our ranch,” Miller said. “I really dislike the show Yellowstone. Like I say, I think that branding your help and then going out and killing people, and making heroes out of these people — it’s awful.

“But I’m not sure what the question was because I couldn’t hear anything.”

Miller came to the work honestly, over time. She was born into a ranching family.

“I grew up on a ranch over in Pinesdale [Montana, pop. 805]. We were raised in rodeo. I mean, this is — I'm going back to it, but you know how we were talking about different types of horses are good for different things, but you wouldn't want to buy one of those type of horses for trail riding or ranching, the horses that they’re using in Yellowstone. If you watch them closely, they hang their heads down. If you get them out in the real world, they'll stumble and everything. Okay, I’ll quit now. Okay.”

American Horses premieres Wednesday on PBS (8/7c) and on the PBS app. 

Paramount Network

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PBS Nature: The World’s Greatest Ocean Feast

“Hunger is good discipline,” Ernest Hemingway wrote in A Moveable Feast, and like so much of Hemingway’s work, what he wrote in the privacy of his study would have a larger, wider reach once it escaped into the world. 

The PBS Nature program The Ocean’s Greatest Feast tells a story about one such moveable feast, but it’s a story that’s rarely told and virtually unknown, at least to popular culture and mass-market natural history programming.

Alone, a single fish may seem insignificant. Together, though, they can shape the fate of an entire coastline, we learn in The Ocean’s Greatest Feast’s opening moments. In the calm, relatively untrammelled waters off South Africa, billions of sardines begin a mass migration each year, lured by the promise of food, shelter and a more comfortable life thousands of miles away. It’s the largest movement of living things on Earth, and yet little is known of this mass migration.

As with so many of nature’s mass migrations, the journey is long, hard and arduous — “nature’s greatest ambush,“ we’re told — where every predator along the African coastline lies in wait, from gannets and sea lions to sharks and dolphins. Even as the planet’s climate systems go through paroxysms of volatility, forcing us to pay more attention to the Earth’s carefully intertwined ecosystems, where the failure of one species can disrupt the entire food chain with far-reaching effects science is only now beginning to understand.

It sounds counterintuitive but where apex predators like sharks and orcas go, so go every other species goes. If the sardine migration fails, the entire food chain will collapse. The sardines sustain the vast congregations of Cape fur seals that gather on the remote African coastline to feed, belch, quarrel and raise their pups, which demand to be fed every four hours. The Cape fur seals in turn provide food for some of the biggest great white sharks on the planet — surfers in wet suits can look startlingly similar to a seal when viewed from below, which is why it’s never a good idea to surf wherever fur seals and great white sharks can be found together.

Cape gannets time their entire breeding cycle on the unpredictable arrival of the sardines, yet another example of how completely unrelated animal species depend on each other for survival. It’s not just birds, either, but bottlenose dolphins, 

The Ocean’s Greatest Feast is disarming in its simplicity of storytelling. It’s understated in tone, gently paced with peaceful, unironic narration, and the visuals are unusual for how rarely underwater scenes of birds swimming after fish ever make it into nature programs. It’s not the kind of flashy program that will draw anxious TV viewers away from the commercial broadcast networks and streaming sites, but there’s something genuinely appealing about sitting back and appreciating nature in its calmer, gentler moments. PBS Nature has always managed to navigate the often blurred line between popular entertainment and fact-based science without pandering to the lowest common denominator or overwhelming the casual viewer with a dizzying parade of facts and figures — the spreadsheet approach to science programming. The Ocean’s Greatest Feast is worth a look. It’s not something you’ll discuss over a latte with friends at the local sidewalk café in the morning, but it will make you feel better for having seen it.

The Ocean’s Greatest Feast premieres Wednesday on PBS Nature at 8/7c.

©Earth Touch

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PBS Nature: Penguins - Meet the Family

Penguins are familiar to virtually anyone who’s been to the zoo or had a stuffed toy as a child, but as we learn in the occasionally too-cute-by-half PBS Nature program Penguins: Meet the Family, there are more penguin species in New Zealand than in any other country on Earth. That will come as a surprise to anyone who associates penguins exclusively with Antarctica, but the familiar emperor penguin, the largest penguin and instantly recognizable with its black head, tangerine beak, white-and-orange-trim throat and white stomach and midriff, is just one of 18 separate species.  

With no natural predators, New Zealand has always offered these flightless sea birds a sanctuary. Antarctica, on the other hand, far from being free of predators, is home to both the leopard seal —  comes by its name honestly — and a remnant population of Southern Ocean orcas, one of the most quick-thinking and efficient predators in the entire marine ecosystem.

Penguins are believed to have lost the ability to fly some 60 million years ago in evolutionary terms, and small wonder: swimming is what penguins do best. 

The program 

With no natural predators, New Zealand has always offered these flightless sea birds a sanctuary. Antarctica, on the other hand, far from being free of predators, is home to both the leopard seal —  comes by its name honestly — and a remnant population of Southern Ocean orcas, one of the most quick-thinking and efficient predators in the entire marine ecosystem.

Brooklyn actor Jayce Bartok narrates Meet the Family in one of those scratchy, goofy voices where you can’t tell if the narrator’s being coy or playing to an audience raised on Disney cartoons. If you prefer your nature programs narrated with gravitas — Joe Morton wins pride of place in my book, with his narration for the sweeping, unforgettable 2001 PBS-National Geographic docuseries Africa — but Bartok’s child-friendly tone works for penguins, even when they’re fleeing murderous sea lions. (The original 2020 BBC One program was narrated by the French-born UK biologist and TV presenter Liz Bonnin.)

Advances in camera technology have pried open the window on animal behaviour in the natural world wide than it has even been in the half century since David Attenborough first hosted Zoo Quest in 1954. It’s a real privilege to get so close to penguins as they meet, mate and raise their chicks in some of the most brutal weather conditions on the planet. The two species of Antarctic penguins, emperor penguins and king penguins, are unique in that they hatch their eggs on their feet. Don’t ask: You have to watch to understand how that works, and why.

It’s not entirely fun and games — childless penguins, lonely would-be parents, will kidnap other penguins’ chicks in a heartbeat, and for that reason a chick’s call is as unique as a fingerprint: Parents, mother and father both, can detect an offspring’s distinct cry even through a hail of wind and snow.

Midway through the program we see how penguins form colonies, in some of the largest groupings of birds seen in nature. There is indeed safety in numbers, even when the parents start fighting with other parents. It turns out it takes a village to raise a penguin, as well.

Penguins: Meet the Family premieres Wednesday on PBS Nature at 8/7c, and on the PBS app.

©Poring Studio/PBS Nature Shutterstock

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PBS NOVA: Arctic Sinkholes

PBS NOVA examines a strange new side effect of global heating through its science-based lens in this week’s program Arctic Sinkholes. The accompanying footage, filmed over months of exploration and analysis in the wintery flats of deepest, darkest Siberia, is both eerie and sobering.

On one level the overhead views of gigantic craters appearing in primeval permafrost resemble similar scenes in the Hollywood horror classic The Thing, in which scientific researchers in Antarctica happen on a giant ice crater and unwittingly release a malevolent beast that is Not of This Earth.

The craters in Arctic Sinkholes are very much of this earth, though, and they are as real as they are unsettling. Sinkholes don’t make for sexy news images like those depicted in the now nightly stream of news bulletins about high winds, savage storms, bone-bracing cold where it should be warm and January spring thaws in northern polar regions where it should be cold. The very words “climate change” are apt to bring a collective groan to those viewers who’ve already written off talk of a global climate crisis as just another social media talking point — the latest fad in café conversation — but there it is: This sudden appearance of sinkholes in previously rock-hard frozen tundra is just one more indicator that the global climate crisis is spiralling out of control — yet another sign that what we are witnessing is not so much a crisis as an impending emergency.

PBS Nova has always been one of the more sober, science-based weekly programs on commercial television, and it’s perhaps no surprise that anyone wanting to learn the hard facts behind strange sightings should turn to a program that has been demystifying the scientific and technological conundrums that have defined our lives on a weekly basis since 1974. Despite the fluff and trivia that dominates the news cycle in cable television — savagely lampooned in Netflix’s Don’t Look Up — there is clearly an appetite for reason and science-based fact across the globe: Nova is now seen in more than 100 countries around the world, and is now available globally on Amazon Prime.

Why do Arctic sinkholes matter, you ask? It’s a fair question, and Nova meets it head on. Over entire eras in geological time the frozen tundra in Canada and Russia’s far north has  trapped vast amounts of methane, a group-14 hydride alkane, the main constituent of natural gas. The relative abundance of methane makes it an economically attractive fuel, though capturing and storing it poses technical challenges due to its gaseous state under normal conditions for temperature and pressure. Needless to say, conditions during a worldwide climate crisis are anything but normal. And as heat generating greenhouse gases go, methane makes carbon dioxide look like child’s play. Methane has the potential to boost the heat trapped by already worrying carbon emissions to levels not seen sincethe age of lava rivers and constantly erupting volcanoes.

Arctic Sinkholes shows how many of those craters in Siberia were caused by colossal explosions and reveals a lake in Alaska that literally bubbles with flammable gas. The melting permafrost, and the methane it releases. The name itself, “sinkhole,” is misleading, we learn. The craters are not sinkholes so much as the remnants of underground explosions.

“If permafrost thaws, that's a scary wildcard in the climate change story, because we think there's a huge amount of methane and natural gas trapped inside permafrost and under permafrost,” biogeochemist and aquatic ecologist Katey Walter Anthony says in the program. 

“There’s a lot of discussion about carbon dioxide and its relationship to climate, but the impact of methane coming out of the Arctic is potentially enormous,” Nova co-executive producer Julia Cort adds.“Making accurate predictions about the future depends on good data, and Arctic Sinkholes reveals what scientists have to do to get that data, as they try to measure an invisible, odourless gas that’s underground in some of the most remote and challenging environments in the world.”

It’s not a pretty sight.

Nova: Arctic Sinkholes premieres Wednesday at 9/8c on PBS and on the PBS app. 

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The Amazing Race

The Amazing Race might seem like on odd way to kick off a new year in the middle of a pandemic, but there it is. It took less than two hours in last week’s curtain-raiser on Race’s milestone 33rd season to remind us what has made the program a favourite all these years with homebound adventure seekers.

Whether it was the young woman  who confessed to host Phil Keoghan that she first watched Amazing Race when she was eight-years-old and never dreamed that she might one day actually participate, or the appropriate Darwinian twist of the season’s first pit stop being London’s Natural History Museum — where Keoghan greeted teams mere metres away from the historic marble bust of Charles Robert Darwin, FRS, FRGS, ZSL, born in 1809 and the father of 10 children — The Amazing Race was propelled by pure joy and joie de vivre. That exuberance for life is what has made The Amazing Race so special all these years. 

Yes, the teams sometimes quarrel and bicker along the way — one worries on occasion that a lifelong friendship or even a marriage will be sorely tested if not broken entirely — but there is none of the nastiness and cruelty associated with so many reality-competition programs.

This was always going to be a problematic season, though, and by the end of Wednesday’s program the reality of the SARS CoV2 pandemic — aka COVID-19 — will become clear. After worried consultations with Race organizers and producers Elise Doganieri and Bertram van Munster — van Munster, a career cameraman, has directed virtually every hour of Amazing Race’s 33 seasons to date — Keoghan informs the suddenly worried looking racers that the race is being suspended.

Incredibly — and the more one thinks about it, the more incredible it gets — the race will resume 18 months later, with the same teams, starting from the same location where the race was suspended more than a year earlier. It is a little like stopping the Super Bowl after the first quarter and then picking it up with the same teams and the same scoreline more than a year later.

How the hiatus — Keoghan has playfully described it as the program’s longest pit stop in its decades-long history — affects this seasons teams will become more clear in next week’s episode. We already know, though, that this time the race ran its course, the winning team won fairly and squarely, and somehow Doganieri and van Munster made it under the wire before the Omicron variant has thrown another wrench into the whole notion of international travel.

This season’s teams appear well matched, from “the middle-aged mom and dad" who admit “there's an advantage to youth in this race,” to the US service veterans who stopped a terrorist attack aboard a train in France, to the flight attendants who insist their travel experience gives them an edge, but don’t realize that the UK is no longer in the EU, but make it through anyway (“It’s not a big deal! Don’t worry! We’ll redo it!”). That joy for life is evident in every frame, all the more so when the teams are handed a second chance months after the race is interrupted by COVID lockdowns.

The Amazing Race was always fun to watch, but this season it seems downright exhilarating. That’s no accident.

                                          — CBS, Paramount+

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