Nature programmes used to celebrate how enormous and wondrous our world is. Then the climate crisis forced them to adapt, so they became programmes about how wondrous our world was, and still could be, if we could only stop damaging it. Now, wildlife series are evolving again, and Life on Our Planet is part of a new breed that looks at humanity killing itself, and says: hey, nature has been through worse than this before. Here, the story that will happily carry on without us is told to us as an awesome, cinematic epic.
The concept is very close to that of Chris Packham’s superior BBC series Earth. We are taken through a timeline spanning more than 2bn years, during which life on the planet begins, evolves and is repeatedly threatened by mass extinctions, caused by changes in climate or sudden catastrophes. The natural world that humans are only one small part of today is itself a small fraction of the species that have ever existed – but the creatures of the present have inherited their key characteristics from the vanished greats of the past.
