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The BBC has shot thousands of hours of nature footage over the years, so they have an extensive vault of footage that’s never been seen. So what’s the best thing to do with it? Add funny human voices and make a sketch show out of it, of course! And then add Helen Mirren’s narration! That’s the idea behind When Nature Calls With Helen Mirren.
WHEN NATURE CALLS WITH HELEN MIRREN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: Some sweeping vistas, including some mountain scenes. Helen Mirren intones: “The natural world. Stunning in its beauty.”
The Gist: When Nature Calls With Helen Mirren (the title was modified when the Oscar winner signed on to narrate) essentially a sketch-comedy series where human voices are laid over stunning nature footage from the BBC (the show is based on the format of the BBC series Walk On The Wild Side).
The idea is that Mirren narrates most of an episode with the gravity and seriousness of any nature narrator, making sweeping generalizations about the beauty and grandeur of nature, but with the concept that we can now hear what these animals are saying to each other.
Then we watch a bunch of capuchin monkeys watch one try to get into a bunch of rocks, with a voice over making the monkey like a suburban husband trying to fix the air conditioner on his own. Squirrels stuff their cheeks and talk about the “work” they’ve done on them in a Real Housewives segment. A wolf walks into the camera and gives “Unpopular Opinions” like “I don’t get why people like Chris Hemsworth.”
Even Mirren gets into the act, going “off-script” to ask a producer if she can take home some furry creature she sees on her screen. She also decries the popularity of social media influencers, among other asides.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? If you marry a David Attenborough nature show with something like the Bad Lip Reading video series, this is the result.
Our Take: We give K.P. Anderson, the showrunner of When Nature Calls, credit for signing Mirren to do this show, which only happened earlier this month. It gave the show a little more credibility, and the idea that the Dame (she calls herself “any old Dame” at the beginning of the episode) would add some seriousness to the proceedings makes the contrast between the sketches and Mirren’s funny asides even more acute. But the problem with the show is that the sketches are painfully unfunny.
Despite the fact that the show is rated TV-14, there is very little edginess to the sketches. For instance, in the Real Housewives sketch, the squirrels talk about their cheeks then berate another furry creature for calling them “Ma’am”. But if the sketch wanted to “go there,” it would show the squirrels fighting over something one of them said on Twitter, or getting in an argument over some lack of invite to a party.
Thankfully, the sketches only last about 30 seconds or so, and then the scenery moves on. And believe us when we say that the scenery is the best part about the show. Culled from the thousands of hours of BBC nature footage, it’s some spectacular stuff. But the sketches are so flabbily written that, despite the voice over artists’ best efforts to make these sketches funny, all of it falls flat.
Sex and Skin: None. There aren’t even mating scenes in this episode.
Parting Shot: Toads fighting, with one toad “telling” another to get out of her house.
Sleeper Star: All of the cinematographers and directors who got that footage for the BBC over the years deserve all the credit in the world.
Most Pilot-y Line: Mirren calls the BAFTAs the “British version of the MTV Movie Awards.”
Our Call: SKIP IT. We like the idea of Mirren goofing around over goofy footage of animals being human. But When Nature Calls With Helen Mirren is so thuddingly unfunny that you’ll actually get bored while watching it.
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.
