One Strange Rock is a Cosmos for the Earth-bound that’s worth watching

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If you work or live in a city, it’s easy to forget how powerful and delicate nature is. Even if you do get quality outdoor time on a regular basis, it’s hard to hold in your mind how this dichotomy of strength and vulnerability expands across the globe, connected by systems of air, water, and sunlight that tie the whole planet into a single complex system.

But the National Geographic Channel has just the antidote to our collective myopia. A 10-episode series called One Strange Rock debuts tonight at 10ET/9CT, and if you get that channel, it’s worth checking out. The series is a detailed look at some of the Earth’s macro- and micro-scale bio-systems that keep our tiny planet alive. It’s a lot like Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s Cosmos, but strictly with an Earth focus.

Some pre- and post-production magic

One of One Strange Rock‘s interesting twists is that a lot of this ecology lesson comes from former astronauts, including Chris Hadfield, Mae Jemison, Peggy Whitson, Jerry Linenger, and more. Though it may not seem like an obvious choice to everyone, telling the story of life on Earth through the voices of the only people who have left Earth works perfectly.

The astronaut narration was a bit of serendipity, according to Executive Producer Jane Root. (Root, for context, is the former president of the Discovery Channel and has since founded her own studio, Nutopia, which specializes in TV-documentaries.) As the team was working on how to build this series, someone asked if there would be a narrator. “It was a huge breakthrough to use astronauts,” she said. “[During pre-production], someone we were working with had the idea of astronauts, and she said, ‘I had this idea, it might be mad but…’”

Everyone behind the scenes of One Strange Rock loved the suggestion, however. And as a viewer, it really does skillfully change the show’s trajectory.

The first episode, called “Gasp,” goes in depth on how massive dust storms from Africa fertilize the Amazon, and how that fertilization helps trees produce oxygen and pull water up into the atmosphere. Subsequent episodes—”Storm” and “Shield”—address how the Earth was made and how Earth’s magnetic field protects life, respectively.

The topics are interesting themselves, but I can not stress enough how perhaps the biggest strength of this series is its visual style. Darren Aronofsky and his longtime collaborator Ari Handel were executive producers on this project, and the visual style that you see in movies they’ve worked on together (like The Fountain, Black Swan, and The Wrestler) is just as present in One Strange Rock. Combined with National Geographic’s reputation for high-quality photojournalism, the first three episodes of One Strange Rock are stunning and worth your time even on mute (although don’t do that: again, you want to hear the astronauts speak).

Each episode takes you around the world, viewing parts of the Earth through biology, chemistry, astronomy, and human culture. The series does a great job of interviewing local researchers in the field, not just relying on staged interviews from a musty office at UC Berkeley. One Strange Rock also keeps its episodes moving: you never quite feel like you’re “done” with a topic, because every new scene unfolds with a new perspective.

Among my critiques, I would say that the main narrator, Will Smith (notable defender of Earth from Independence Day), had a jokey delivery that sometimes grated. By episode three, I felt like he started hitting the tone of the show a bit better, so perhaps the later episodes are more fluid. But in episodes one and two, his quips and jokes were jarring compared to the rest of the show, which tends to come off more deliberate and even a bit more serious (though it’s by no means overly dense). Most likely, Smith’s delivery does well with kids, and this is a family-friendly show, so maybe my mildly annoyed reaction wouldn’t be shared by parents who want to watch something from Aronofsky without scarring their child for life (I saw Requiem for a Dream as an adult and it still scarred me for life).

Whether you have kids or not, this show will probably teach you something about how the Earth works, or at least it will show you beautiful images of what you already know. I asked Root about how Nutopia fact-checks these kinds of TV documentaries, and she said that they have a “huge number” of people who fact-check each show. “We write very detailed annotations… we try to always go to several sources not just one source,” Root explained.

One thing you may notice in the first three episodes if you’re a reader of Ars is that, for as much as One Strange Rock focuses on the science of Earth systems, there’s not a lot of focus on climate change. In episode three it’s mentioned, but the topic doesn’t get a lot of playtime, at least in the first three episodes Ars has viewed. Root says that for the purposes of this show, that’s deliberate. Root said that approach stems from when she worked with David Attenborough on Planet Earth, where they took the position that before you can address the problems we’ve created on Earth, “you have to fall in love with it.”

“What you want to do is have something that has… joy, and levity and excitement,” Root added. “We wanted it [One Strange Rock] to be about the astoundingness and beauty of the Earth.”

Nitpicks aside, if falling in love with Earth again is what the producers of One Strange Rock wanted from me, mission accomplished. To those of you who have been stunned in the past by a series like Planet Earth yet finished that wanting even more focused environmental info, set your DVR.

One Strange Rock debuts tonight on the National Geographic Channel with episodes two and three scheduled to air on the following Mondays.

Listing image by National Geographic

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1282117