Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Life On Our Planet’ On Netflix, A Docuseries About How Species Evolve, And How They Become Extinct

Life On Our Planet, narrated by Morgan Freeman, is a docuseries that examines how, over Earth’s 4.5 billion year existence, species evolved, survived, and in many cases, became extinct. With CGI by Industrial Light and Magic paired with new scientific research and film of current-day species, the docuseries shows how, the almost-20-million species of plants and animals alive on Earth today are only one percent of species that ever existed, and how they evolved and survived.

LIFE ON OUR PLANET: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: “TWO MILLION YEARS AGO.” We see a Smilodon, a prehistoric saber-toothed cat, on our screens. Narrator Morgan Freeman says, “Two million years ago, and our planet is a very different place.”

The Gist: The first episode discusses “The Rules of Life,” and then shows examples of those rules, but not before rocketing through billions of years of evolution, from our one-celled ancestors to amphibians, then reptiles, then dinosaurs, then mammals.

The first rule: The best adapted will aways win through. The example given are butterfly eggs that birth leaf-devouring caterpillars, but there are leaves that have evolved to fight those caterpillars. However, caterpillars and butterflies have made their own evolutionary advances.

The next rule: Competition drives adaptation. Male terror birds are shown battling it out for territory, but they’re not just competing with each other, as a pair of Smilodons attack the fighting terror birds in order to get a meal.

Rule three: Earth never remains stable for long. One of the longest stable periods was the 100 million years when dinosaurs ruled the planet, and we see plant-eating Miasauras traverse hostile, protective moms to get to their own nests, and a triceratops get threatened by a T. Rex and her youngsters.

Of course, the stability that the dinos enjoyed was destroyed in a short period of time by a meteor strike; the survivors were the mammal species that evolved into what rules today.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? While the format of Life On Our Planet is similar to dozens of other nature shows, the CGI of prehistoric animals reminds us of the Apple TV series Prehistoric Planet.

Our Take: The aspect of Life On Our Planet that is the most interesting is the CGI of prehistoric species. It’s the same thing that made the aforementioned Prehistoric Planet fascinating to watch; via the amazing CGI, paired with new science about how these species evolved to survive, the lives of these long-gone species can be examined like living species are.

The format of the show is also fascinating, because instead of just showing these extinct species in their natural habitats, the series revolves those scenes around the evolution that gave those species the anatomy and skills that allowed them to survive. The first episode is a bit of a review, then it’ll go back to the planet’s earliest days and show the progression of how life evolved, showing how cells evolved to sea creatures, and then how those sea creatures evolved to live on land, all the way through the current day.

It will also examine the five mass extinctions that happened over the span of Earth’s history and how close the planet is to the sixth. Those episodes may or may not hold any new insights, but the journey to that point will have certainly been fascinating to watch, given the visual effects throughout the series’ eight episodes.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: Scenes from the second episode, examining how life first emerged underwater, and how the first aquatic species crawled onto dry ground to live.

Sleeper Star: This goes to the people at ILM who applied the known science about prehistoric species to make realistic looking CGI of these species in their natural habitats.

Most Pilot-y Line: None we could find.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Life On Our Planet is a fascinating look at how life evolved on Earth, with stunning visual effects that show how long-extinct species might have lived.

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.