4.4 • 636 Ratings
🗓️ 1 July 2025
⏱️ 47 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
In 1954, a young David Attenborough made his début as the star of a new nature show called “Zoo Quest.” The docuseries, which ran for nearly a decade on the BBC, was a sensation that set Attenborough down the path of his life’s work: exposing viewers to our planet’s most miraculous creatures and landscapes from the comfort of their living rooms. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz trace Attenborough’s filmography from “Zoo Quest” to his program, “Mammals,” a six-part series on BBC America narrated by the now- ninety-eight-year-old presenter. In the seventy years since “Zoo Quest” first aired, the genre it helped create has had to reckon with the effects of the climate crisis—and to figure out how to address such hot-button issues onscreen. By highlighting conservation efforts that have been successful, the best of these programs affirm our continued agency in the planet’s future. “One thing I got from ‘Mammals’ was not pure doom,” Schwartz says. “There are some options here. We have choices to make.”
Read, watch, and listen with the critics:
“Mammals” (2024)
“Zoo Quest” (1954-63)
“Are We Changing Planet Earth?” (2006)
“The Snow Leopard,” by Peter Matthiessen
“My Octopus Teacher” (2020)
“Life on Our Planet” (2023)
“I Like to Get High at Night and Think About Whales,” by Samantha Irby
New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.
This episode originally aired on July 11, 2024.
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0:00.0 | Are we proud to be mammals? |
0:04.0 | I mean, that's a good question, actually. |
0:07.2 | Are we the worst mammal? |
0:08.9 | I mean, certainly. |
0:10.1 | Just in the sense that, you know, a cheetah could viciously tear an antelope, limb from limb, you know what I mean? |
0:18.5 | Like, the cheetah's capacity for, you know, |
0:22.8 | intellection and understanding of what she's doing is not ours. So when we pray on a weaker, |
0:31.9 | even though we might do it in a less overtly vicious way, we're probably worse because we know what we're doing. |
0:39.4 | Oh, yeah. I mean, we are wonderful in a terrible species, but I know what the second worst |
0:43.3 | mammal is, the orca. Oh. Jump free willy. Did you guys see what the orca did? |
0:49.4 | With the, with the, with the, with the, with the, with the, with the, with the, with the, with the whale calf. The calf? Oh. One of them was killed on site, drowned immediately within view of its mother. |
0:57.0 | The other one was taken hostage, just, |
0:59.0 | there we go. |
1:00.0 | I'm swimming on a back, just like I'm used to, splashing around, and then it was drowned. |
1:04.0 | And then drowned. |
1:05.0 | Let's just hope they don't make it onto land. |
1:07.0 | Well, they're like destroying cruise ships and yachts all over Spain every day. |
1:11.5 | That I'm okay with. |
1:12.3 | I mean... |
1:13.0 | That's fine with me. |
1:16.0 | I say go after any cruise ship or any yacht, but please leave the whale calves alone. |
1:25.7 | Welcome to Critics at Large, a podcast from The New Yorker. |
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