Are natural history shows getting softer or are we less squeamish?
Are natural history shows getting softer? Or are we getting less squeamish? The Americas, a stunning 10-part series from the BBC Natural History Unit and US studio NBCUniversal, suggests the Wild West of the animal kingdom still has a few gentle twists and turns.
For kids who grew up in the infancy of the BBC’s Natural History Unit, we are accustomed to seeing the savage realities of life in the animal kingdom, typically set to a soundtrack of David Attenborough’s scholarly narration, all hoarse whispers and dispassionate intellectualism.
Raccoons in the Big Apple.Credit: BBC Studios
But with Hans Zimmer’s Hollywood soundtrack, and Woody from Toy Story as the narrator – that is, actor Tom Hanks – The Americas takes us into a world where the bear cubs, and the owls, and a few other beautiful species have perilous brushes with evolutionary risk but live to fight another day.
Is life in the animal kingdom really that easy? “There are a lot of answers to that,” explains producer and natural history filmmaker Mike Gunton. “One of them is, we tell the truth. That’s what happened. We couldn’t tell them, ‘Could you please die for us?’”
But neither does Gunton have a strong appetite for predation stories, which is something he shares with the audience. “That’s not because I’m squeamish, it’s just I don’t think it’s that interesting,” he says. “Animal A chases animal B. It either kills it or it gets away, not very dramatic. I find more subtle, more involved relationship stories much, much more interesting.”
Less certain, perhaps, is how much Gunton and his team have been influenced by the fact there are still many “‘jaws and claws’ shows out there”, he says. “I don’t know whether I’ve swung a bias in that way … I just think jaws and claws shows tend to draw a particular, quite narrow, audience. My own family, they’re not interested in watching predation. And maybe that’s influenced us.”
BBC Natural History filmmaker Mike Gunton (left) with The Americas narrator Tom Hanks.Credit: Austin Hargrave/NBC
In technological terms, the series represents a major evolutionary step in natural history filmmaking. There are drones that allow cameras to travel with herd animals in ways that human camera operators, either on foot or in vehicles, could not.
Those cameras were also able to skim the surface with blue whales, and go deep-diving with sperm whales. In innovation terms, we’ve come a long way from cameras hidden in rocks, but it does make you wonder how much the technological tail now wags the documentary dog.
“What’s interesting about that question is it’s always been a kind of yin and yang because there’s no doubt there are times when a new piece of technology appears and that opens up doors,” Gunton says. “But just going to the other side, there’s also things on a series like The Green Planet where we had editorial challenges, we wanted to tell stories about a particular part of nature, which we could not, so [we asked the question] how can we develop some technology to do that?”
A mature female orca (Orcinus orca) hunting a dolphin in the Sea of Cortez, Baja Sur, Mexico.Credit: BBC Studios
“What I love about the new technology is not the technology for its own sake, but what it can then reveal about animals that you couldn’t see before. Because the thing that always got me excited about this whole business is I want to show you things you can’t see with your own eye, that only the camera can see.”
The result is a merger of skills, “a wave where operators and scientists and natural historians are kind of combining their skills”, Gunton says. In The Americas, he says, there are no fewer than 20 sequences that could not have been done five years ago, largely off the back of drone technology.
“We had great flyers, people who knew a lot of natural history, we had lots of science, but getting them together with somebody who could fly a drone sensitively, understand the natural history, get the animals close, with the photographic sensibilities of a wildlife filmmaker, that takes time,” he says.
The Americas lands at a peculiar crossroads in US life. Hallmark’s small-town Americana programming is at peak popularity. Elsewhere, Netflix is rebooting Little House on the Prairie. And the Trump government is fuelling a strong, sometimes discomforting, sense of nationalism. That the series explores “the Americas” made it an easy pitch to co-production partner NBC, Gunton says.
A remote camera captures a passing jaguar in the protected mangroves of Marismas Nacionales, Nayarit, Mexico in documentary series The Americas.Credit: BBC Studios
Part of the job in natural history documentary development, Gunton explains, is “looking ahead for zeitgeist in terms of natural history, and there is no question that one of the reasons why this got commissioned was, when we were talking to [US network] NBC, and they were looking for something large scale, when I said it was called The Americas, they immediately said, OK, this is going to work for us”.
“There are no politics in this whatsoever, but it’s quite a patriotic show,” Gunton adds. “Whether you live in the Caribbean or in Mexico or in Manhattan, you are going to feel proud of where you live because these animals share their home with you.
“And on the other side of the spectrum, we are doing the other thing we always do, which is to say, [all of that] but we’re also going to take you to places that I’m sorry you will never get to. These are the wildest places on earth. That’s why we’ve structured it by hotspots rather than by habitats.”
The humbling postscript to that idea is that the series somewhat flips the humanocentric script of the parallel political discourse. We may dominate the news narrative, but the ecosystems in which we live are thriving with other forms of life, and peeling open these micro-universes somewhat disavows our confidence that we are the beginning and end of the Earth’s story.
The owls are not what they seem.Credit: BBC Studios
“Humbling may be a response, but I think it’s also thought-provoking,” Gunton says. “These lives are going on irrespective of us. Human activity is impinging on everything now, of course, but the animals … they’re just trying to make the best of it. What we’ve tried to do in all the storytelling and the positioning is look at those animals’ lives.”
What the screen reflects, Gunton says, are animal lives not so dissimilar to our own. “Looking after your babies. Trying to get a girlfriend. Trying to get a boyfriend. Trying to find food. Making sure you don’t get in trouble. Putting a roof over your head. All these things connect us; they are the basic fundamental challenges we all face.
“When you see those reflected, I hope that both makes you feel empathetic towards the animals, but I hope it also makes you think about your own life. These are philosophical challenges we all face. I want them to discover or rediscover a love for nature, but also realise we are a bit anthropocentric, we are part of a bigger machine, a bigger ecosystem.”
The Americas premieres at 7.30pm, on Tuesday, March 25, on Seven and streams on 7Plus.
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