Warm up your flatscreen, lay in the seaweed snacks, dust off that bottle of blue curaçao, set out some scuba-related decor, maybe a cannabis product or two—and what do you have? The makings of a Blue Planet party!
The second season of this groundbreaking ocean documentary—airing Saturday nights at 9:00 p.m. on BBC America—has to be the purest pleasure generator television has given us since . . . well, since the BBC’s last eye-popping nature show, Planet Earth II, in 2016. Eleven years in the making and a huge ratings smash in the U.K. when it appeared there last fall, the seven-part David Attenborough–hosted show is one astonishing oceanic sequence after another. Last week’s premiere proceeded briskly from a diligent tusk fish in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, to fearsome trevallies that leap above the water to swallow birds cleanly out of the air, to hideous Japanese Kobudai fish that nestle in coral for weeks and emerge (somehow) with a sex change.
There’s simply no better show to experience with company—not least of which because you don’t have to hush your friends to follow the story. An acquaintance in Brooklyn, who had the whole season on a thumb drive, brought a group together to watch one or two episodes on New Year’s Eve. They binged all seven. “We hit pause only to watch Mariah Carey and the ball drop,” she reports. Over in Williamsburg, the movie bar Videology threw a bash with trivia and giveaways for the premiere episode and was packed an hour before airtime. (Sample question: Q: Hans Zimmer collaborated with which acclaimed rock band for the Blue Planet II soundtrack? A: Radiohead.) Nightclubs in the U.K. have organized late-night Blue Planet dance parties, and a search on Instagram yields university students celebrating in cocktail dresses and fish costumes.
There’s still time to put an invite for this Saturday’s episode. What to serve? Nothing to distract from the action: Goldfish, aquatic-shaped gummies, Trader Joe’s “longboard” tortilla chips. Put that blue curaçao to use by mixing a margarita punch: tequila, lime juice, curaçao, Champagne. (A cocktail-savvy friend recommends pomegranate juice for the coloring agent.) And if you’re in a cannabis-legal state, may I recommend something gentle, a low-dose edible or Bloom Farms’s Rose Gold Highlighter vape pen (a hit from which is like having a glass of wine, not downing the whole bottle). You’ll thank me, because Saturday’s episode, “The Deep,” in which a submersible travels a kilometer below the Antarctic sea, plays like a monster movie. Nothing, and I mean nothing, will prepare you for the fish with the see-through head.
