When was the last time a nature docuseries was featured on the primetime schedule of a broadcast network? Yeah, we can’t remember when, either. But NBC is presenting viewers with a ten-episode “event” series narrated by none other than Tom Hanks. The subject? The extraordinarily diverse ecosystems in North and South America.
Opening Shot: Shots of clouds, mountains and wildlife. Narrator Tom Hanks says, “This is The Americas, an extraordinary journey across Earth’s great subcontinent. The widest variety of life on the planet. The untold story of our home.”
The Gist: Filmed over five years, The Americas takes an intimate look at the diverse wildlife on the American supercontinent. The supercontinent stretches from pole to pole and includes both North America and South America.
The episodes are split by region, with the first one looking at the Atlantic coast, and the second one examining Mexico. Other episodes in the series are entitled “The Wild West,” “The Amazon,” “The Frozen North,” “The Gulf Coast,” “The Andes,” “The Caribbean,” “The West Coast” and “Patagonia.”
On the Atlantic coast we start with wild horses crossing shallow ocean waters on North Carolina’s Outer Banks, with an older male horse defending his territory against younger interlopers. Then the scene shifts to the Graveyard of the Atlantic, where hundreds of years’ worth of sunken ships have become a home to hundreds of species of marine life.
We see a bald eagle on the Chesapeake Bay fight an osprey for a fish, and cicadas in suburban Maryland come out of the ground after their 17-year gestation period. In New York City, a mother raccoon defends her kits against a red-tailed hawk, while the older kit leaves for good under a shroud of darkness. In the Smoky Mountains, a mama black bear helps her cubs reach nourishing cherries high up on trees. And in New England the life cycle of leaves on a stout oak tree known as a “triple oak” is shown in more detail than we’ve ever seen before.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The Americas is produced by prolific nature docuseries producer Mike Gunton, and this series reminds us of others he’s done, like Planet Earth II, The Green Planet and Dynasties.
Our Take: One thing that The Americas shows is that the technology around shooting nature keeps getting better. The cinematographers that worked on this series didn’t just get the usual spectacular sweeping vista footage, though there’s plenty of that here, including some amazing time-lapse footage of trees changing color in New England. They also got plenty of intimate shots, whether they’re of insects or snakes or raccoons holing up in a stone wall.
Getting Hanks to narrate the series is an inspired choice; despite his relatively subdued narration style here, there are flashes of the sense of humor and impishness in parts of his narration. He manages to take what are pretty standard nature documentary scenes, like baby animals being unsure about leaving the nest or predators stalking their prey, and gives them a simiar air of importance that the best known narrator in this genre, Sir David Attenborough, gives the docs he works on.
If there is anything innovative about The Americas is that it makes things that were previously unseen into interesting drama. We don’t think we’ve ever seen the detailed process of how a tree draws back its clorophyll in the fall and cuts off nutrients to its leaves in order for them to fall, all in an effort to protect it from winter winds. Whether the closeups in that segment were time-lapse video, CGI or a combination of both, but that segment was the most fascinating to us because it was something we hadn’t seen before.
What’s also interesting is that the series is broken up by region. We’re not going from one coast to another. There’s a thematic aspect to each episode, and even if sometimes the region being covered seems huge, there is definitely a good sample of wildlife from that region that is shown.
Sex and Skin: There’s no mating scene in the first episode.
Parting Shot: Shots of New England in fall, “one of Earth’s greatest natural wonders, and it happens on our very own doorstep, on Amerca’s spellbinding Atlantic coast.”
Sleeper Star: We’ll give this to the film crew that followed the racoon and her kits in New York. The scenes of the baby trash pandas sticking their heads out of a hole in a stone wall were riduculously adorable.
Most Pilot-y Line: None really, though we sort of wish that Hanks’ narration was a bit more Hanks-like. There’s nothing wrong with a less-serious narration in a nature docuseries.
Our Call: STREAM IT. While The Americas continues the recent trend of nature docuseries that leverage new technology to get clear, intimate footage of wildlife, its concentration on different regions of the American supercontinent, and Hanks’ narration, make it worth watching.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.