The Splendor of Nature, Now Streaming
Critics at Large | The New Yorker
The New Yorker
4.4 • 679 Ratings
🗓️ 30 January 2025
⏱️ 46 minutes
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Summary
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
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This episode originally aired on July 11, 2024.
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, Vincent here. |
| 0:08.0 | A quick announcement before we get into the episode. |
| 0:12.0 | First, we're working on something really fun and we need you, listeners, to help us out, |
| 0:18.0 | especially if you are a fan of the genre known as Romanticy. |
| 0:23.2 | Right now, Alex Nomi and I are deep in preparation for an episode all about this absolutely huge |
| 0:30.3 | genre. We've recently become acquainted with terms like Akatar. I myself am dipping into a series called Fourth Wing, |
| 0:39.2 | which I've heard referred to as the horny dragon books. |
| 0:44.1 | We're trying to understand what Romantasy is all about, |
| 0:47.1 | and we need your help. |
| 0:48.4 | Here's the assignment. |
| 0:50.0 | If you yourself have fallen down the Romanticy rabbit hole, |
| 0:54.0 | we want to hear all about it. |
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| 1:13.7 | at New Yorker.com with the subject line, critics. Now, on to this week's show. If you follow the work |
| 1:22.4 | of International Treasure, David Attenborough, you might know that his new BBC series is now available in the U.S. |
| 1:30.2 | Of all the wonderful places in the world, one continent holds more riches than any other. |
| 1:48.4 | It covers almost a third of the land on Earth. |
| 1:50.8 | It's called Asia. |
| 1:54.6 | And the first episode just aired this past weekend. |
| 1:59.1 | It felt like a good time to resurface an episode of Critics at large that is all about Attenborough's work and the mark he's left on the world of nature documentaries broadly. |
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