Planet Earth
Eleven episodes, five years of filming, and one planet showing off. The BBC's 2006 landmark was the first nature documentary series the corporation shot in high definition, and it turned nature TV into event television — the show everyone bought an HDTV to justify, narrated by David Attenborough (or, if you watched it on Discovery, Sigourney Weaver).
Planet Earth premiered on BBC One in March 2006 as the most expensive nature documentary series the BBC had ever commissioned — and its first shot in high definition. The scale was the point: five years in production, eleven episodes, each one taking an entire biome — mountains, caves, deserts, shallow seas — and treating it like a planet of its own. Nature documentaries had always been respectable television; Planet Earth made them spectacular television, the kind you invited people over to watch.
The sequences became legends in their own right. A snow leopard hunting on a cliff face — footage the crew spent three years chasing. Birds of paradise performing absurd, immaculate courtship displays in New Guinea. A great white shark exploding out of the water after a seal, slowed down until it looked mythological. Every episode ended with a production diary showing how the shots were captured, which only deepened the awe: the gyro-stabilized Heligimbal camera shooting steady close-ups from a helicopter, camera operators waiting in hides, patience as a superpower.
Americans got the series in 2007 on the Discovery Channel, famously re-narrated: Sigourney Weaver's voice replaced David Attenborough's for the US broadcast, a substitution that still divides fans — and that made the eventual DVD and Blu-ray sets, with Attenborough restored, feel like the definitive version. The series swept awards, including four Emmys and a Peabody, and became the demo disc of the HD era: if a store wanted to sell you a flatscreen or a Blu-ray player in 2007, it was probably playing Planet Earth.
Its legacy is a whole genre of prestige nature television — sequels and imitators with ever-better cameras. But the 2006 original is the one that changed what television thought a nature documentary could be: not a school assignment, but the most beautiful thing on the schedule.
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