The proverb “Home is where the heart is” dates back as far as the Roman philosopher-poet Pliny the Elder. Pliny penned Naturalis Historia, his exhaustive study of the natural world and widely considered to be the world’s first known encyclopedia of knowledge, in AD 77. At the time, Pliny yearned for a place he wanted to return, the place where he longed to be every waking hour.
Pliny could not know what fate had in store for him, of course. He lived in Pompeii, the ancient city on the Bay of Naples buried under six metres (20 feet) of burning volcanic ash and pumice just two years later, in AD 79. The eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79 obliterated Pompeii, and Pliny perished with it. At least he was at home when it happened.
Different iterations of the saying have emerged over the years, from the J.T. Bickford novel Scandal in 1857 to a 1977 single featuring Gladys Knight & the Pips.
Home — both in its literal sense and in the creative, imaginative sense — formed the core of an hour-long programming announcement Monday by Courteney Monroe, president and CEO of National Geographic Global Television Networks.
NGGTN has been a joint venture between majority shareholder The Walt Disney Company and the non-profit National Geographic Society, which owns 27% of shares, since Disney’s acquisition of National Geographic’s TV properties in 2019.
Home, an ambitious 10-year natural history series to be produced alongside BBC Studios’ Natural History Unit, makers of David Attenborough’s career-defining anthem series Planet Earth, Blue Planet and the soon-to-air The Green Planet, has ambitions of being nothing less than the most definitive portrait of life on Earth ever attempted, according to Monroe. Production is already underway on all seven continents on Home’s initial three seasons, and development is committed to six more seasons after that. At the end, a 10th-season overview of how the natural world has changed — for good or bad — during Home’s decade-in-the-making will serve as a summary statement.
Home is being mounted as a cinematic spectacle of natural history across planet Earth, with its focus on the symbiotic relationship between different species and all living things. “A man’s worth is no greater than his ambitions,” another Roman, the philosopher emperor Marcus Aurelius, declared 100 years almost to the day after Pliny the Elder’s death at Pompeii, and Home is nothing if not ambitious. In a blizzard of more than 20 new program announcements Monday, Home is the one that stood out, and the one that most clearly signals Disney+’s ambition for National Geographic over the next 10 years, and more.
The sheer scale and scope of NatGeo’s slate of new programs reflects the unexpected success of Disney+ and National Geographic collaborations from the past year, including the Emmy Award-winning Secrets of the Whales, NatGeo and Disney’s first Emmy winner for outstanding documentary series, and December’s Welcome to Earth, hosted by — and featuring — actor Will Smith.
Smith will return in the follow-up series Pole to Pole, in which he traverses from the South Pole to the North Pole. Once again, the production is being produced by one-time BBC senior executive Jane Root and environmental activist and filmmaker Darren Aronofsky, the director of Pi, Requiem for a Dream and Black Swan, among others.
Other standout NatGeo Disney+ programs from the past year included the 10th anniversary 9/11: One Day in America and the award-winning films The Rescue, about the 2018 Tham Luang cave rescue of children trapped in an underwater cave system in Thailand, and the natural history biography Being Cousteau.
The Rescue filmmakers Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin are the producers of Photographer, one of 20 new National Geographic series and films being made exclusively for Disney+. Photographer will profile some of the world’s leading nature and conservation photographers; the first episode will focus on BC-based wilderness and ocean photographers Paul Nicklen and Cristina Mittermeier. Each episode will feature a different photographer and will be directed by a different filmmaker. The first episode was directed by Vasarhelyi and Chin themselves.
National Geographic-branded programs have considerable reach around the world, Monroe noted, and are in 173 countries. Monroe said that while the lion’s share of new programs will debut exclusively on Disney+ — not on the NatGeo cable channel — that, “in no way diminishes our focus and investment in National Geographic programming for the linear channel.
“The shows that we [do] launch on the linear channels will find their forever home on Disney Plus, where they can maybe find some new audiences as well.”
National Geographic’s Earth Day programming will continue to air on both the National Geographic channel and Disney+.
The new programs and films will not air all at once, Monroe added. They will be spread out throughout the year, with some programs to make their debut in 2023.
New natural history programs include Lion, from Iron Man director Jon Favreau, which will follow a family of lions over a four year period; Secrets of the Elephants and Secrets of the Octopus, a follow-up to Secrets of the Whales, executive-produced by filmmaker James Cameron; Sentient, a series from Darren Aronofsky that examines the emotional intelligence of wild creatures; and Super/Natural, a documentary series produced by James Cameron and narrated by Benedict Cumberbatch about how emerging camera technology and adaptive filming techniques are changing the way filmmakers view the natural world.
The complete program list:
©National Geographic for Disney+/David Chancellor
©National Geographic/Michael "Nick" Nichols