The Green Planet: Desert Worlds

Nothing grows in the desert, goes an old refrain on the late-night comedy circuit: That’s why they call it the desert.

That’s not exactly true, of course, though it makes for a good laugh line. The reality, as the fourth instalment of the aptly named The Green Planet shows, is that desert worlds are a virtual garden of vegetation: One simply has to know where to look. Of all the episodes in the eye-filling nature series so far, Desert Worlds is the most adroit at showing how the hardiest plants find extraordinary ways to survive Charles Darwin’s battle of the most adaptable, even though water may be scarce to non-existent and temperatures can swing from one wild extreme to another, all in the course of a 24-hour day. There are plants that cling to a tenuous existence by slowing their metabolism to a murmur over lengthy periods of time, while others slither and crawl across the parched land, in an endless search for water.

Some plants hibernate — literally — and come to life in explosions of color at the first hint of rain, while others adopt defensive postures to protect themselves from grazing animals, defensive postures that can involve anything from camouflage to razor-sharp spines. Desert landscapes, including those more aptly described as sandscapes, look harsh and unforgiving in the bright light of day, but look beneath the surface and you’ll find a world of hidden surprises. Desert Worlds opens in northern China, flowing over a sandscape of desert dunes — and, just when you least expect, a grove of trees that has survived more than a thousand years, linked together by a labyrinthine web of unde4ground roots. From China to Mexico in a heartbeat in TV time, the camera sweeps around the gentleman naturalist David Attenborough, now 90, wending his way on foot through a dune sea where it may rain once a decade. There’s a gentle peace and world-lived soul to the way Attenborough talks about the private lives of plants, and what’s truly remarkable is how, even after Planet Earth and a lifetime’s service at the forefront of BBC’s Natural History Unit, he has maintained an almost childlike sense of wonder at the mysteries revealed before him. Not unlike a desert wind, Desert Worlds moves gently but restlessly to the Atacama desert in Chile, then the Kalahari in southwest Africa, followed by the Sonora in the southwestern United States, and everywhere he goes, Attenborough finds something wondrous.

There are almost two thousand different species of cactus, for example, a fact that may come as a surprise to anyone who isn’t a career botanist, and every cactus has a story. These stories are what drives The Green Planet, just as it was stories that drove Blue Planet and Life on Earth before it. Nature is complex, magisterial and full of hidden surprises, and that’s why the stories in The Green Planet never seem tiresome of formulaic. Far from. Watching weeds grow may be the very definition of boredom, but one of Desert Worlds’ singular achievements is how it makes watching weeds grow in one of the driest, hottest, most rugged and inhospitable biospheres on the planet is as gripping as any Netflix cliffhanger.

There’s a memorable moment, midway through the program, when the scene flashes back 40 years to The Living Planet, in which a younger, more svelte Attenborough, stands in California’s Mojave Desert, searching, in his words, “for one particular plant,” the creosote plant, Larrea tridentata.

The scene then flashes forward to present day, and Attenborough is standing over that very same bush. In 40 years, it has grown precisely one inch.

Watch Desert Worlds and you may never look at the desert the same way you again.

The Green Planet: Desert Worlds premieres Wednesday, July 27, on PBS at 8E/7C and on the PBS app. The final episode, Human Worlds, airs on Wednesday, Aug. 3.

©BBC Studios

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The Green Planet: Tropical Worlds

“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

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Prehistoric Planet

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.

©BBC Studios

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