It hasn’t been a great month for the US, at least if you support the Democratic party. Donald Trump’s election victory has put a great big question mark over the entire country and collective anxiety has spiked. People desperately need to be soothed by something. I don’t know about you, but my go-to in times like these has always been sea-based wildlife documentaries. With their combination of wub-wub noises and near-ambient underwater photography, it’s the closest you can get to a brain massage.
But Netflix knows that, this time, a beautifully shot deep-sea wildlife documentary just isn’t going to cut it. No, this is serious. And that is why it has launched Our Oceans: a beautifully shot deep-sea wildlife documentary narrated by Barack Obama.
Superficially, the series is the latest offering from the Obamas’ growing content farm, which has already given us the delightful animated show Waffles + Mochi and the midlife-crisis nightmare fuel that was Renegades, the podcast Obama hosted with Bruce Springsteen. But if you voted for or supported the Democrats this month, Our Oceans basically qualifies as sensory therapy.
With each episode dedicated to one of the planet’s five oceans, the series is first and foremost jaw-dropping. As much as its starry narrator will grab the headlines, the photography is the star here. It is crisp, intimate and shows you the familiar in unfamiliar ways. It’s especially good at demonstrating scale. When the focus shifts to a manta ray or a whale shark, it shoots the animal from below, making it look like a geometric monolith compared with the other creatures swimming around it. It deals in the sort of awestruck majesty James Cameron was aiming for with the last Avatar film, only this is real.
It also succeeds at crafting narratives. We watch a pod of young orcas train to raid a beach and it feels like something from Top Gun. Whales plotting a raid on a salmon fishery? Ocean’s Eleven. Then there is the sequence of a bioluminescent feeding frenzy off the coast of Los Angeles, which might be the single most beautiful thing you will see all year.
For the most part, Obama acquits himself well in his new role. His voice, which has always been steady and soothing, was made for this. (Can you imagine any other high-level US politician pulling it off? Would narration sustain George W Bush’s attention? Would Joe Biden’s narration sustain ours? Does Trump know what a fish is?)
This doesn’t mean that Obama is the new David Attenborough, of course. Attenborough is a career naturalist who almost single-handedly created the genre of wildlife television. Barack Obama is here to emote about dolphins. He isn’t helped by the script, which sometimes seems to underestimate the intelligence of its audience. It’s too folksy, describing the clownfish as “the world’s most famous fish”, presumably because there is a film franchise that stars the species. During a sequence about cuttlefish, Obama growls: “Don’t make him angry; you wouldn’t like him when he’s angry.” At one point, he namechecks Murder on the Dancefloor. At another, he uses the word “fishnado”. Attenborough would never.
However, all this pandering is just sweetener to get you through the door. The reason the Obamas put their name to Our Ocean swims just below the surface. Every time we meet an exciting animal, we are told exactly how humankind threatens it. Humanity is largely an unseen force here, butchering and depleting, introducing invasive species and heating oceans to the point of death. This is an advocacy series in disguise – and a necessary one.
But, for now, let’s just focus on what is right in front of us. Our Oceans is coming out right when half of the US needs it most. If anything is going to get these people through the next few weeks, it’s going to be Obama and whale song.
• Our Oceans is on Netflix now
