The Green Planet: Water Worlds

July 12, 2022

Plants cover much of the world as we know it, David Attenborough notes in the opening moments of The Green Planet’s wondrous second hour, Water Worlds, “but there is another extraordinary green world that is often hidden from us.”

It is a world where plants have overcome huge challenges in order to survive — the world of fresh water, as manifested in streams, rivers and lakes. To succeed, Attenborough tells us, “water plants have had to abandon many of the adaptations that served them so well on land, and evolve something quite new. “And In doing that, they have created some of the most beautiful and bizarre and important habitat on Earth.”

At this point, it’s worth noting that The Green Planet has something so many nature programs lack — magisterial, hypnotic and ethereal choral music, composed in this case by UK Emmy Award composers Will Slater and Benji Merrison, who recently accepted a choral commission for the National Youth Choir of Great Britain. Music matters in this instance, because it adds a new dimension to what is already a moveable feasts of visuals, whether it’s a close-up view of the leaf of a giant water lily — it expands by over eight inches a day and can reach six feet across at its widest point, all protected by inch-long spines — or the overhead view of a magical river in Brazil where, from the air, the water appears to bubble like champagne, propelled by plants beneath the surface that feed into the atmosphere above.

Freshwater lakes, streams and rivers feed an ecosystem that is finely poised, and delicately balanced. The Green Planet wear its conservation bona fides on its green sleeve, but it’s no screed. Attenborough is an old master at this — it’s fair to say no presenter of natural history programs has made a more indelible impression on the conversation about climate change and species extinction — and there is a passion and life force there that is as inspiring as it inspired.

There are so many hidden surprises and tiny revelations in Water Worlds that it’s a challenge to keep at times, from underwater plants that dance — to find enough time in the sunlight to keep growing — to riverine streams in the heart of the Amazon where, despite recent news headlines from the isolated border region that links Brazil with the Peruvian Andes, there are waterways so remote, Attenborough tells us, “that even today few people have ever seen them.” Until now.

Merrison and Slater’s choral music is especially appropriate here because it’s as the viewer has been invited inside a cathedral, a green cathedral bathed in sunlight, set against a magical landscape of miniature mountains and valleys, carpeted in star grass.

We’re living in a cruel and unforgiving world right now, and in this context The Green Planet could not have arrived at a more appropriate — and welcome — time. It’s inspiring and heartbreaking at the same time, a glimpse of Nature as time itself had intended.

In a moving passage midway through the program, The Green Planet reveals the sheer-cliff table mountains of central Venezuela, the tepuis and sheer-sided waterfalls that literally inspired the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle literary classic The Lost World. Conan Doyle published his tale of a life-changing fictional expedition into the prehistoric past in 1912, but as Water World reveals in all its splendour, there are still mysteries to be found — and solved — some 110 years later. And these finds are real. From the swamps of the Pantanal to the lakes of Thailand , Water Worlds is a living marvel.

The Green Planet: Water Worlds airs Wednesday, July 13 on PBS at 8E/7C. New episodes premiere Wednesdays, on PBS and through the PBS app, through Aug. 3

The Green Planet: Tropical Worlds

July 05, 2022

“The biggest living thing that exists on this planet is a plant,” Sir David Attenborough says in his now familiar, hushed voice in the opening moments of the glorious — and wondrous — The Green Planet, and as grabbers go, the gentleman naturalist’s introduction to the giant sequoia tree in California is a portrait of awe in its own right.

Plants, Attenborough tells us, whether they are enormous, like this one, or microscopic, are the basis of all life, including ourselves. We depend upon them for every mouthful that we eat, “and every lungful of air that we breathe.”

The Green Planet, in which we see the lives of plants from the plants’ perspective, marks a high watermark in the pantheon of natural history programming of the kind Attenborough, now 90, has practically defined.

This five-part, five-week epic is a triumph in innovative camera technology but, more than that, it runs the entire range of emotions, from joy and wonder to fear and sadness — “a world that takes you by surprise,” Attenborough says, “and a view of planet Earth as never seen before.”

The Green Planet is a story of life and death, and what could easily have been a bore — cue the inevitable jokes about watching grass grow — is instead as thrilling as anything in Blue Planet or Planet Earth before it.

Tonight’s first hour, Tropical Worlds, marks an apt beginning because, as Attenborough shows us, the tropics are far from sedate and peaceful. More species of plants are crowded together in tropical rainforests than in any other ecosystem on planet Earth, and survival of the fittest means competition every bit as fierce and intense as anything seen on the Serengeti plain. The beauty is astonishing — and also deadly. Fast-growing vines choke off much-needed sunlight from trees many times their size, and yet photosynthesis and the delicate balance between predator and prey ensures that both will survive in the end, in one form or another, but only to a point.

Tropical Worlds is a study in symbiosis, a jungle home where a giant, subterranean fungus provides much-needed sustenance for leaf-cutting ants, which in turn trim the tropical rainforest of its unwanted vegetation. Life on Earth is a finely tuned balance between stillness and movement, as Charles Darwin found, but the bigger surprise here is how plants themselves are in constant motion — strike and counterstrike — despite seeming to be suspended in animation to the naked eye. Seedlings sprout in the tropical rainforest, in countless shades of green, closely followed by those voracious vines, seeking every drop of spare rainfall and every ray of filtered sunlight from the canopy above. There are balsa trees whose blossoms fill and refill six times in a single night, to attract the pollinators they need to survive, while the blood-coloured petals of the so-called “corpse flower,” rafflesia, three-feet across, have a scent so putrid it attracts carrion flies, where they are swallowed and devoured whole.

There are wonders here, too, from a bioluminescent fungus in the Congo, “chimpanzee fire,’ that glows in the dark as it releases billions of spores into the night air, and it’s hard not to appreciate the forces of nature at work, in ways every bit as compelling as seeing a blue whale give birth in the deep sea.

The Green Planet is nothing short of an astonishment. In all, the program took 10 years to make, but that’s not entirely true. There are moments here that were 500 million years in the making, and it shows.

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The Green Planet premieres Wednesday, July 6 on PBS at 8E/7C. Subsequent episodes air Wednesdays through Aug. 3

Borgen: Power & Glory

June 23, 2022

Adapt or die. That mantra of Darwinian evolution — and an increasingly active environmental movement — takes on poignant and urgent new meaning in the stirring, often unforgettable political drama Borgen: Power & Glory, from playwright and former head-of-drama for the Danish broadcaster TV2, Adam Price.

The original Borgen, which premiered on the Danish public broadcaster DR1 in the autumn of 2010, ran for three seasons and won the 2013 Peabody Award, unheard-of for a foreign-language drama with English subtitles, especially a drama that focused on an issue as potentially offputting to a mainstream television audience as party politics in a small European middle power. The original Borgen told how, against all the odds, Birgitte Nyborg, a moderate, left-leaning politician, is appointed the first female prime minister of Denmark after an election ends in gridlock between previously dominant political parties of conservatives, socialists, liberals and far-right nut jobs. Nyborg, consummately played by Sidse Babett Knudsen — nominated in 2012 for the International Emmy Award for outstanding actress in a drama series — elects to govern according to her own principles, resulting in bitter back-room power plays between those who want to depose her and those who see her as a breath of fresh air in a world of politics grown old and stale.

So far, there’s nothing here to suggest that Borgen would be resurrected nearly 10 years later, and by Netflix of all places, as that increasing rarity: a compelling TV revival that — surprise — turns out to be just what the world needed: a relevant, topical, eight-hour drama so adult and so nuanced that it puts most other political dramas to shame.

It helps, of course, that Power & Glory creators Adam Price and Martin Lidegaard, a sitting MP in Denmark’s parliament and chairman of the government’s Foreign Policy Committee, came up with an idea that’s both topical and urgent: the climate crisis, and the way Big Oil uses its influence to hold world economies to ransom by exacerbating the already tense conflict between the fossil fuel industry and renewable energy.

Power & Glory opens in Greenland, a vast, relatively untrammeled Arctic land mass with a total population of 56,000 primarily indigenous First Nations people under the stewardship of Denmark, Europe’s 12th largest economy, with a population of six million. A Canadian oil company has just discovered a vast oil field which, if early signs are true, could rival the entire output of Norway’s gas and oil industry combined— basically, enough money to create no end of corruption, influence peddling and international chess playing. There’s just one catch: Nyborg, now Denmark’s chair of foreign policy and short-listed to become the country’s new minister of foreign affairs, is at heart still an ardent environmentalist. It’s only a matter of time — three hours in TV time — before she’s in conflict with her boss, the sitting prime minister, her own party, her coalition partners, and the small matter of not one but three world powers, Russia, China and the US, all of whom are eager to exploit Greenland’s resources to their own and not entirely compatible ends. Before you can say, a Shakespearean play for the 21st century, the tenuous bond that keeps power and peacemaking connected begins to fray at the edges.

There is so much in Borgen: Power & Glory to recommend it, from the gorgeous Arctic setting — Power & Glory was made on a Netflix budget, and it shows — to the uncanny way it shows the urgency of climate breakdown; to its eerily prescient take on current affairs in the real world (there’s even reference to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and upheaval in the oil markets, little more than 100 days after the actual war began); to the acting, including a tour-de-force turn by newcomer Mikkel Boe Følsgaard as a junior level diplomat confronted with an emotional crisis that almost breaks him — to, and this is the most profound and poignant of all, the way the clearest eyes and fullest hearts on the environment belong to the young people, Indigenous and Danish alike.

Borgen: Power & Glory is part passion play, part political thriller and wholly engaging, with big ideas about how “The future is female” (the title of the opening episode) doesn’t always result in sisterly solidarity, and how tempting it must be to cross over to the dark side if it means earning a just result in the end. Heavy is the head that wears the crown — all the more so when the very climate is at stake, together with the future of the planet. Borgen is brilliant.

— Netflix, streaming globally.

Prehistoric Planet

May 22, 2022

Prehistoric Planet, producer Mike Gunton and presenter David Attenborough’s audacious five-night nature series that strives to do for Cretaceous Period dinosaurs what Planet Earth did for our present-day world of natural history, opens with Attenborough strolling beneath the life-sized replica of Tyrannosaurus rex at London’s Natural History Museum. “Surely,” Attenborough says, in that gentle, sonorous and yet gripping voice he has, “one of the most remarkable animals to have ever existed, certainly one of the most famous, is a dinosaur,” — pausing for dramatic effect — “Tyrannosaurus rex.” The King. Monster of God.

“An animal to spark the imagination for all of us,” Attenborough adds, and just try to keep your imagination in check for the next hour.

To the extent that Prehistoric Planet is breathtaking — and that it is, from the first-hour Coasts which opens the series Monday on Apple TV+, with other hour-long episodes following each night through May 27, all on Apple TV+ — the entire epic is about sparking the imagination. Palaeontologists, biologists, anthropologists and the CGI effects team that gave the world Disney’s Jungle Book and The Lion King have recreated the world as it was 66 million years ago, and the truly remarkable thing is that they have succeeded in making the entire project seem believable, real, actually there, happening right before our eyes.

The idea sounds absurd — cringeworthy, even. There was always the chance — a tyrannosaurus rex sized chance — that the finished result would resemble one of those lame sci-fi movies from the 1960s, complete with laughable stop-motion effects, bombastic music blaring away and gaudy, clearly faked backdrops as loin-clothed Hollywood matinee idols fended off an army of human skeletons with no more than a pirate’s sword, all the while being menaced from above by a cloud of angry pterodactyls.

Well, you won’t laugh once during Prehistoric Planet, not at anything on the screen, anyway.

“What kind of an animal was it?” Attenborough asks us, and that’s when we know he’s about to show us something marvelous — graceful, dignified, frightening and utterly rivetting. “What did it look like? How did it live?”

And Prehistoric Planet is about to show us exactly that.

“The latest imaging technology enables us to bring it all to life,” Attenborough adds, but he needn’t have bothered. Hans Zimmer’s title music swells, a rising crescendo of digital percussion, and the die is cast. Just two minutes into what just might be one of the most epic natural-history programs ever committed to the small screen, we’re almost literally transported back in time. The resulting effect is wondrous.

Series producer Tim Walker deserves a lot of the credit here, together with Gunton, whose past work for BBC’s Natural History Unit — all with Attenborough — includes Planet Earth II, Dynasties, Africa and the soon-to-debut Green Planet. Every animal in Prehistoric Planet is afforded its own backstory, based on what modern-day scientists have learned from the age of the dinosaurs. In the opening sequence, a mother tyrannosaurus and her four newborns swim for the safety of dry land, pursued by an ocean predator even bigger than she is. Tyrannosaurs lose at least two-thirds of their original brood of 15 within the first year, Attenborough tells us, and who’s to doubt him?

In scene after scene, dinosaur after dinosaur, from crocodilian predators to benign, tiny bird-like creatures, each and every dinosaur character gets its moment in the sun — playing, mating, hunting, searching, getting together and interacting, the cycle of life, as it was 66 million years ago. The cumulative effect is oddly human … and humane. Watching a tyrannosaurus toddler make a mess of a would-be meal by chasing a clever baby turtle that outwits it at every turn is a reminder of those real-life moments that make programs like Planet Earth and Blue Planet such a joy to watch.

Prehistoric Planet is Apple TV+’s first foray into the kind of high-end, large-scale natural-history programs that have become a calling card for BBC and National Geographic, all the more so since Geographic’s recent merger with Disney. Netflix tackled the effects of climate change and the increasingly urgent conservation movement with its own docuseries Our Planet, also presented and narrated by Attenborough.

Prehistoric Planet is in that class. The creative imagination never seemed so inspired, and yet it looks, feels and appears grounded in reality. After all the dazzling effects and the life-and-death moments, that might just be Prehistoric Planet’s crowning achievement. In a word, it works.

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Prehistoric Planet premieres globally on Monday, May 23, on Apple TV+. A new episode streams each day until May 27, after which the entire series will be available on-demand.

PBS Frontline: The Power of Big Oil

April 18, 2022

The truth is the first casualty of the climate wars, it turns out.

By now, with the climate showing increasingly worrying signs of volatility and wild, unseasonal temperature swings across the globe, there should be no doubt. No other Earth Day has witnessed such extremes. Whether fossil fuels are the cause of climate breakdown, or whether they are “merely” a contributing factor, no longer matters. The crisis is here, and it is dire.

The first two hours of PBS Frontline’s ambitious, three-part exposé The Power of Big Oil is thoughtful and quiet, then, as these kinds of TV exposés go. It’s not so much about the dark, malevolent power Big Oil has unleashed on the planet, driven by profit-seeking, as it is the story of a cover-up: How the fossil fuel industry manipulated the mainstream media and created a debate within the scientific community where there shouldn’t have been any debate. As early as the mid-1970s, those in the know warned of what was coming, even as Big Oil’s manufacturers of consent preyed on the public’s fears of economic decline and job losses. The energy crisis that brought down Jimmy Carter’s US presidential administration played into heavy industry’s hands, by accident and by desire, in equal measure. See, Big Oil’s message went. Oil is crucial to the economy. Big Oil has your best interests at heart. And God help anyone, even a democratically elected US president, who agues otherwise.

Frontline’s producers have taken an unusual and courageous approach in their two-hour opening act. (Subsequent instalments air April 26 and May 3, also on PBS.) The opening two hours focuses on the cover-up — what did Big Oil’s policymakers know, when did they know it, and how did they convince some scientists to turn against their own findings and argue that the Al Gores of the world were hysterical alarmists out to convince a gullible public that the end was nigh and it was all Big Oil’s fault, when in reality Big Oil was on the public’s side in the first place. Today, that seems like an absurd argument, but large sectors of the public were gulled into believing it.

Frontline’s exposé is quiet where other programs might be weighted down with bombast — not so much sound and fury signifying nothing as soft-spoken voices warning of a terrible price to be paid for modern-day comfort across the industrialized world. The Power of Big Oil’s opening two hours show how the manipulation of the mainstream media — coupled with expensive, glossy ad campaigns — can swing the majority of public opinion into believing that nothing is wrong, that the alarmists are just that. Crisis, what crisis? Exxon, Shell, Total, BP and the others can keep your job safe, your home heated, your bank balance in the black, and save the planet at the same time.

The dark arts of media manipulation — manufacturing consent, Noam Chomsky’s called it — is anathema to the commercial broadcast networks, which rely on ads to survive. In one real sense, only public broadcasting — and PBS Frontline in particular — can take on a subject as volatile as media consent. And if the opening night of The Power of Big Oil seems a little dry at times, listen closely and you’ll find a thriller every bit as complex and challenging as anything in a John Grisham drama. The Power of Big Oil is The Pelican Brief as documentary.

A brief caveat here: Not one of the fossil fuel players approached by Frontline for comment agreed to an interview, and the program producers are up-front about that in the program: “We asked,” they say, “but they would not answer.” The unspoken question — what do they have to hide? — reveals an equally undeniable truth: By refusing to reply, the fossil fuel industry can maintain the illusion of plausible deniability.

Which is where the whistleblowers come in.

“We were there,” they say, “we witnessed the campaign of disinformation, we were a part of it, and now we’re ashamed. Telling the truth now is an atonement of sorts — we only hope it isn’t too late.”

That’s a powerful admission, and watching these first two hours of The Power of Big Oil, it’s hard not to think of the opportunities that were missed. We see where the climate is today, on the eve of Earth Day 2022, and the question becomes: How different might it have been if people had listened? Al Gore posed that question at the time, and was roundly ridiculed by some. It’s the Don’t Look Up question writ large, in the real world.

Perhaps one of the reasons so few policymakers listened is that Big Oil shaped the story in such a way that they didn’t have all the information. Or, worse, they did listen and chose to ignore it, for any number of reasons: Economic, out of greed, to stay in power, or some malevolent combination of all three.

The Power of Big Oil covers a 40-year period that takes in multiple US presidential administrations, draws on thousands of pages of newly uncovered documents, and features more than 100 in-person interviews. Documents make for dull TV viewing, but they’re essential for clearing up any confusion that lingers, especially when they show how critical decisions were made, and not made.

“I do think that scientists have a moral obligation to point out the implications of their findings and try to do it as clearly possible,” one scientist says in the program.

A rational person might ask why that’s even necessary to say out loud, but that’s how media manipulation works: It takes straightforward information and bends and shapes it to fit a preconceived argument. Science doesn’t deal in ifs, buts and maybes. It deals in facts. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be science.

This program makes for hard viewing at times, but it’s critically important. Today, more than ever.

PBS Frontline: The Power of Big Oil premieres Wednesday on PBS, at 10E/9C.