'Life,' visually
stunning as life itself
Discovery Channel series strings spectacular moments
By Tom Conroy
Mar 19, 2010
After six decades of broadcasting and a decade of high definition, TV still often fails to take advantage of the fact that it’s a visual medium. The airwaves are cluttered with talking heads, badly shot reality shows and static sitcoms.
The Discovery Channel’s new documentary series “Life” can’t be accused of that. Eleven hours of beautiful panoramic shots and close-ups of animals and plants around the world, the series presents one fascinating or moving moment after another.
The show, however, doesn’t add up to more than the sum of its admittedly stunning parts. Each hour feels like a highlight reel, with no particular theme or lesson emerging by the end. But viewers who are willing to feast on the visuals won’t complain.
The series, premiering this Sunday with two episodes at 8 and 9 p.m., is something of a sequel to Discovery’s acclaimed series “Planet Earth” and “Blue Planet,” which were also produced in collaboration with the BBC. The photography is at the same high level, although it’s not quite as dazzling, if only because it’s been done before.
The narration, however, leaves something to be desired. Delivered by Oprah Winfrey in a steady voice that’s a constant reminder that what you’re watching is good for you, the writing is often pedestrian, falling far short of the visuals.
Setting up an amazing sequence in which a male bullfrog rescues its tadpoles from a stagnant puddle, Winfrey says, “This is not a deadbeat dad.”
Before footage showing a humpback-whale mating ritual called a “heat run” — which the producers say has never been filmed in its entirety before — Winfrey says of the pursued female whale, “She lets all the potential suitors know she’s here and ready to rumba.”
Each episode is based either on a theme, such as “Challenges of Life,” or on a category of animals, such as “Reptiles and Amphibians” or “Mammals.” One could hardly expect those vast topics to be covered in an hour, and the show doesn’t really try.
It basically strings together a row of beautiful or spectacular moments — a group of Komodo dragons stalking a water buffalo, a seal evading a dozen killer whales, two grebes doing a winsome mating dance — with loose narrative segues, then strains to come up with a lesson to sum it all up.
At the end of the reptiles and amphibians episode, we are told that they are uniquely adapted to survive. At the end of the mammals episode, we are told pretty much the same thing about them.
But the tidbits along the way are almost always fascinating. There is a species of fish in Africa that survives by eating hippo dung and then grooming the hippos’ skin and mouths. A tiny South American frog carries its tadpoles one by one from the jungle floor to deposit them into water-filled plants in trees, where it feeds them by laying sterile eggs.
When the mind isn’t engaged, the eye is. Various sights, like the flock of bats silhouetted against a full moon and the little Japanese mudskipper taking a gulp of air so its young can breathe, will haunt viewers for days.
If nothing else, “Life” will convince anyone that that new wide-screen TV was worth it.
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