Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Our Living World’ On Netflix, A Cate Blanchett-Narrated Nature Series That Shows The Connections Between All Living Things

Our Living World, narrated by Cate Blanchett, is a four-part docuseries that takes a deeper look at nature than just showing various species living their lives. What the series attempts to do is really show how all living things are interconnected. What one species does in the Arctic, for instance, affects the climate in the rainforest in a very specific way.

OUR LIVING WORLD: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A rhinoceros walks through a residential street in a city in Nepal.

The Gist: The first episode of Our Living World is about “Nature’s Amazing Network,” and we see the rhino making its way through that Nepalese city in order to get to its feeding grounds; of course, the vegetation in those feeding grounds are there because of that network. In the Arctic, a baby reindeer is protected from predators like wolves by its mother and the herd, and the activity of the herd and wolves running makes for an even, reflective snowy surface for the light from the sun.

That helps the surface of the ocean freeze, with warmer waters circulating underneath. That flow affects the tropical coral reef, where we see a cuttlefish in an egg protect itself from predators while seeing the world outside its transparent bubble.

The ocean’s flow affects the formation of clouds and storms, with lightning splitting molecules and generating nitrates that replenish nutrients in the soil when it rains. In other examples, a cougar maintains order in the rainforest; without the big cat’s hunting activities, its grazing prey would decimate the vegetation. When it attacks and kills a crocodile, the carcass it leaves behind provides nutrition to the fungi that feed the root systems, and on and on it goes.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Our Living World is produced by James Honeybourne, who also produced Our Great National Parks. One of the directors is James Shelton, who produced One Strange Rock. Another director, Laura Coates, produced Animal Impossible. Let’s just say this show is full of people with lots of nature series experience.

Our Take: Our Living World is chock full of spectacular photography, with some interesting closeups of things that we wonder how the filmmakers were able to catch. A good instance of this is when two hippopotamuses fight each other in a territorial dispute. There are up-close scenes of the hippos grappling with each other, with each of their powerful jaws getting jabs in as water flies around them. There are closeups of insects in the rainforest, the aforementioned cuttlefish eggs, and other rare finds. It’s the kind of show that takes a lot of coordination between producers and the various nature filmmakers who captured this varied footage.

What we strained to understand is the connections the producers made to rocket from location to location. We admire the scope of Our Living World, where the producers try to show how the actions of a species on one side of the world affects species on the other. Sometimes the connections that Blanchett explained in her reverent, at times mildly snarky narration made lots of sense and was fascinating to learn about. At others, the thread of how two regions were connected was hard to follow, and felt like the filmmakers were somehow stretching to make a connection in order to link two disparate scenes together.

Other episodes will talk about things like timing, and how the rhythms of the seasons affect species, and the affect of climate change. The final episode will talk about the rebalancing of an ecosystem after poaching and wildfires left things out of whack. What we’re hoping for is that there will be less straining to make connections in those episodes and more straightforward storytelling that accompanies the fantastic footage.

Sex and Skin: No mating scenes in the first episode, so fans of that particular staple of nature docuseries are out of luck here.

Parting Shot: In a preview of the second episode, we see a frog missing a dragonfly. But when Blanchett says “Timing is everything,” we see that frog about to snag that dragonfly.

Sleeper Star: No one in that Nepalese city seemed fazed by that rhino walking through the streets. Some people took videos on their phones. Seems to be a nightly occurrence.

Most Pilot-y Line: None we could find.

Our Call: STREAM IT. The producers of Our Living World take a novel approach to the nature docuseries, showing different ways living beings on this planet are connected. Sometimes those connections are a bit strained, but the footage that is being used outweighs a lot of those flaws.

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.