14 hours ago
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It does seem a little spoiled to be critical of a documentary as gorgeous as The Americas, a vast, grandiose Tom Hanks-narrated nature series which explores territory from New England to the tip of Patagonia. But we are living through an extraordinary glut of nature television, and the pool of previously unfilmed and unfilmable natural world scenes must surely be getting smaller. This 10-parter talks up its credentials as something new and different: five years in the making, gathered over 180 separate expeditions, capturing discoveries which have never been on camera before, the most expensive unscripted project ever made by NBC (via BBC Studios). Why, then, does it feel so familiar, and occasionally even tepid?
This is nature television that is best enjoyed with your brain closed off. Much like Apple TV+’s recent The Secret Lives of Animals, it favours cutesy anthropomorphism and spectacular visuals over any honest assessment of nature and the environment as a whole. There is little brutality, barely any peril – a red-tailed hawk hovers near some adorable racoon babies, but that’s about it – and an almost offensive unwillingness to even consider the impact humanity has had, and continues to have, on species and their habitats.
Clearly that is not what it’s here to do. Choosing Hanks as narrator positions it in a cosy corner, and he delivers on that. It would be churlish not to be awed by the footage, which is amazing in the truest sense of the word. Anyone with a passing interest in animals or the great outdoors will find plenty of surface entertainment here. On the Outer Banks of North Carolina, wild stallions fight for dominance, manes flying in the wind in slow-motion, as if an 80s soft rock band is performing their chart-topping ballad. In Chesapeake Bay, a bald eagle, surprisingly bad at getting fish out of water, instead pinches them from osprey, who are much better adapted. In the Graveyard of the Atlantic, there are sand tigers, which have formed a mutually beneficial relationship with a much smaller fish, protecting it from predators while, presumably, it hides the shark and allows it to eat that predator.
In some vaguely defined suburbia, periodical cicadas emerge after 17 years underground. Watching them assume their adult form, as they shed their old skin, is gruesome and mesmerising. We see fireflies putting on a spectacular performance in the Appalachian woods, and of course, that old nature show standard emerges in the Smoky Mountains, as a protective mother bear is shown to watch over and fight for her cubs. Its most fascinating footage, to my eye, is of an oak tree in Massachusetts, dropping its leaves for autumn. It sounds ordinary, but to watch that long process of the leaves losing their green, turning red and brown then falling from the tree, all sped up into a few moments of television, is remarkable.
Why, then, does this feel so shallow? In part, because for all of its promises of new discoveries, it falls back on well-worn anthropomorphism. The eagle, brought back from near-extinction by a conservation programme (the only mention of conservation here), thrives due to its “attitude”. The raccoons, hustling for existence in New York City, have an anxious mother protecting her young from the hawk, but also an eldest son, who must leave the family home and make his own way in life. The bears of the Smoky Mountains – America’s most visited National Park – are bringing “magic to millions”, as if their sole purpose is to be characters in some real-world Disney attraction.
The danger of this approach is that it makes it sound as if everything is fine, that sufficient moxie will allow endangered species to thrive, that the natural world is the same as it ever was, only now we can watch it from our sofas and are encouraged to go “ahh”. There is nothing wrong with a cute nature documentary, in ordinary times, and this is lovely to look at and impressively filmed.
But these are not ordinary times. Climate denial is thoroughly mainstream. The US administration is erasing mentions of the climate crisis across government websites. BP is increasing oil and gas pollution and reducing its investments in renewable energy. Humanity has buried its head in the sand and is allowing it to become entombed there. I suppose you could argue that is not the job of a sweet nature documentary narrated by Tom Hanks to bang the drum about the scale of the climate crisis. But it is becoming less and less easy to sit back and enjoy the show when that show is wearing blinkers and sticking its fingers in its ears. Even if it is humming a pretty tune.
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The Americas aired on BBC One and is on iPlayer now.
