10 / 10
Official trailer
Blue Planet II is the BBC natural history television series narrated by David Attenborough. The BBC Natural History Unit in Bristol produced the series with James Honeyborne and Mark Brownlow as the executive producer and series producer respectively. The series originally aired on BBC One between October and December 2017. The seven-episode series provides thorough documentation of marine environments using technical approaches developed in the sixteen years since the original Blue Planet (2001). Each episode runs approximately sixty minutes.
The seven episodes are: “One Ocean,” “The Deep,” “Coral Reefs,” “Big Blue,” “Green Seas,” “Coasts,” and “Our Blue Planet.” The series covers approximately two hundred marine species across forty countries with one hundred twenty-five expeditions. Hans Zimmer, Jacob Shea, and David Fleming composed the score.
Blue Planet II is the best nature television I know, and it made me gasp more often than most thrillers do. Every episode has at least one sequence that leaves me wondering how on earth a camera got that close. Attenborough’s voice guides it, the score swells in the right places, and the final episode stoked my anger in exactly the way a good documentary should.
The BBC Natural History Unit produced the series over four years and used technical advances that had become available since Blue Planet’s 2001 production. Submersible technology, camera sensor sensitivity, underwater stabilization, and remote camera deployment had all advanced considerably during the intervening period.
Blue Planet II is consistently cited among the major natural history productions of the late 2010s. The closing episode (“Our Blue Planet”) addresses marine plastic pollution, ocean acidification, and climate change impacts on marine systems. The episode’s specific cultural impact has been major.
The “Blue Planet II effect” entered British policy conversation as shorthand for the series’s influence on later UK government action on single-use plastic restrictions.
The Technical Generation
The series deployed technical approaches that hadn’t been available during Blue Planet’s 2001 production. Crewed deep-sea submersibles had become significantly more capable. The Triton 3300 submersibles used in the production could work at depths of one thousand meters with film-quality optical viewing windows. Remote underwater camera systems had advanced through multiple generations. Tow camera systems could maintain stable footage of fast-swimming species across extended distances. Underwater lighting systems had improved to support filming at depths previous productions couldn’t effectively illuminate.
The technical improvements produced specific content the original Blue Planet couldn’t have captured. The bait ball sequences in episode four (“Big Blue”) use stabilization technology that the 2001 production lacked.
The hydrothermal vent footage in episode two (“The Deep”) uses submersible access that the original production couldn’t arrange. The tool-using tuskfish sequence in episode three (“Coral Reefs”) uses sustained underwater camera presence that the original equipment couldn’t have supported. Later productions can considerably extend earlier landmark coverage when technical generations advance.
The 2001 Blue Planet remains foundational, and I’d never tell anyone to skip it. The 2017 series adds material the original production couldn’t have included, and the jump in what the cameras can do is thrilling to watch.
For Writers
Later work in a field can considerably extend earlier landmark contributions when technical or methodological generations have advanced. Blue Planet II adds content that Blue Planet couldn’t have included. The lesson is that previous excellent work doesn’t foreclose later contribution. Each generation can extend what previous generations established. The strongest work in any field accumulates across multiple contributions instead of emerging from a single definitive treatment. Build the work that extends what previous excellent work established.
The Plastic Pollution Material
The series’s closing episode (“Our Blue Planet”) covers marine plastic pollution in detail no prior natural history series had managed. The episode documents specific plastic impacts on marine wildlife including the pilot whale family carrying their dead calf for sustained periods (the calf had likely died from milk contaminated by plastic toxins consumed by the mother), the albatross chicks fed plastic by parents who mistook plastic fragments for food, and the sustained accumulation of plastic in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
The pilot whale carrying her dead calf is the hardest thing in the series for me to sit through. The camera stays with the mother and lets her grief make the argument, and that hit me harder than any speech about plastic could.
The cultural impact was heavy. The series’s documentation contributed directly to later UK government policy on single-use plastics. The 2018 UK ban on plastic microbeads in cosmetics, the 2018 announcement of plans to extend plastic straw and stirrer bans, and the 2019 Resources and Waste Strategy all cited Blue Planet II as contributing public-awareness context. The “Blue Planet II effect” became a term in British policy discussion.
Documentary work can produce concrete policy consequences when the documentation is sufficiently absorbing and the wider cultural moment is receptive. The series’s contribution to public understanding of marine plastic pollution exceeded what any single advocacy organization had achieved through directly political work. The documentary form has distinct capacities that direct advocacy work can’t match.
For Writers
Strong documentary work can produce policy consequences that exceed what direct advocacy achieves. Blue Planet II contributed to real UK plastic policy changes. The lesson is that the documentary form has its own persuasive capacities. The accumulated documentation of harms moves readers and viewers differently than explicit argument does. The reader who sees the consequences engages differently than the reader who reads about them. Document the reality. Let the documentation persuade.
The Tool-Using Tuskfish
The series’s third episode (“Coral Reefs”) includes the first thorough footage of tool use in fish. The footage documents an orange-dotted tuskfish that uses a coral outcropping as an anvil to break open shellfish prey.
The fish carries clam shells in its mouth, swims to a coral location, and strikes the shell against the coral repeatedly to crack it. Scientific literature had described the behavior, but no one had filmed it.
The footage required sustained presence with the individual fish. The production crew identified the tool-using individual and maintained underwater filming presence across multiple feeding events.
The result was footage that shows tool use in fish with the same level of behavioral documentation that previous Attenborough productions had provided for primate and corvid tool use. The technique extends mammalian and avian cognitive documentation to include fish cognition. The audience reads tool use as a more widespread cognitive capacity than previous documentary work had suggested.
Thorough documentation can shift broader understanding of animal cognition. Each new taxonomic group documented as cognitively complex expands the scientific and cultural recognition of widespread cognitive capacity across vertebrate evolution.
The tuskfish is my favorite creature in the whole run. A fish hauling a clam across the reef and whacking it on the same chunk of coral until it cracks is funny, clever and a little humbling. I’d put that sequence up against any animal behavior footage Attenborough has narrated.
For Writers
Thorough documentation can shift broader understanding of subjects that specialist research has long covered. The tuskfish tool use had been documented scientifically but the broadcast documentation shifted public awareness. The lesson is that translation from specialist research to public engagement is a contribution of its own. Identify research findings in your field that specialists know but general audiences don’t. Thorough documentation in accessible form can produce understanding that specialist publication alone can’t achieve.
Craft Note
The hadal zone sequence in episode two (“The Deep”) shows the series’s specific approach to extreme deep-ocean environments. At depths from six thousand to eleven thousand meters, the hadal zone had been almost entirely inaccessible to previous natural history documentation. The Blue Planet II production worked with deep-sea research teams to deploy specialized camera systems at depths previous broadcast natural history hadn’t approached.
The footage documents specific deep-sea species including the snailfish (which lives at depths up to eight thousand meters) and the giant amphipods that scavenge on the deep ocean floor.
The sequence runs approximately four minutes and represents the first thorough broadcast documentation of hadal-zone species. The audience experiences environments at pressures that would crush most equipment and most organisms. Scientific-production collaboration can deliver content that purely broadcast operations couldn’t access.
The hadal zone sequence is among the most-cited individual passages on extreme-environment biology in natural history television.
Is Blue Planet II as good as people say?
10/10. One of the major BBC natural history productions of the late 2010s and the demonstration that marine documentation can considerably extend across multiple production generations. The technical generation advances, the plastic pollution material, the tuskfish tool use documentation, and the hadal zone sequences all justify the series’s standing. The cultural and policy consequences of the series exceed those of most natural history productions. Watch the complete seven-episode series.
It’s a 10 because it does everything I want from nature television at once. It shows me animals I didn’t know existed, it catches behavior nobody had filmed properly, and then it turns around and makes me seethe about what we’re dumping in the water. I can’t find a weak episode, and the pilot whale sequence alone would earn it a high score.
