DISCOVERY
The secret to the appeal of Discovery’s Human Planet, which debuted last night, is that it is as much about the second half of its title as the first. That’s not to say simply that it replicates much of the how-did-they-do-that camera wizardry of predecessors Planet Earth and Life. It’s also that it focuses on a situation that is as old as humanity but that is increasingly rare (at least to anyone watching Human Planet on a big-screen TV): a struggle to survive, not in relation to other people, but in relation to the geographic and physical challenges of keeping a body alive on the Earth’s surface.
Human beings in the 21st century, obviously, have hardly erased suffering. But with the development of civilization, most of us find that our problems are basically socially created and have to do with the challenges of human culture. The more fortunate of us deal with stress and the rat race; the less fortunate, with poverty or war. Rarer is the circumstance that used to be humanity’s default, as it is for the animals that Discovery’s previous series have covered: how to survive against forbidding nature, how to keep a body’s processes functioning against the planet’s physical threats: ice, water, mountains, extremes of weather.
So it’s not as if Human Planet exactly exoticizes its subjects, people from around the globe trying to get by in awe-inspiring physical locations. (Diving, on the show’s first night, for food in 60 feet of water, or navigating treacherous passes in the Himalayas.) But their situations are exotic all the same. They face the demands of humans and human society—making a living, educating children—but amid spectacular natural challenges.
And spectacular is the operative word. As is now expected on these shows, the camera delivers a stunning vista every few minutes. (The backdrop of Victoria Falls, near which one subject fished in a river, looked like a CGI terrain from a science-fiction movie.) In a way, Human Planet is not just a follow-up to Planet Earth, but a high-gloss, answer to shows like Deadliest Catch and Coal—TV for people in comfortable living rooms, making drama out of people who interact with nature more tangibly, physically and dangerously than most of of the audience do anymore.
But when Life or Planet Earth showed amazing feats of survival, it was animals in the state of nature. When Human Planet does, it’s generally to show how, even at the most remote outposts of life, its subjects are driven to risk largely by the structures of human society. They risk their necks seeking barnacles on a rocky coastline for the money, for instance, or, in the most awe-inspiring and terrifying section of the “Water” episode, to bring their kids to school through a 50-mile walk over a frozen riven in Tibet.
Human Planet is most compelling, in other words, when it keeps in mind the “Human” half of its title. Did anyone here catch the first night?