It's been a really busy year for Apple TV Plus, with a pretty unrelenting release schedule for most of the year, but that's over now because the streamer has released its final series of 2024 in the form of The Secret Lives of Animals.
As you can probably tell from the name, The Secret Lives of Animals isn't a period drama or sci-fi series like many other of the best Apple TV Plus shows of 2024. Instead it's a nature documentary, narrated by Hugh Bonneville, with each episode looking at a different stage or component of life from lots of of different animals' perspectives.
For example the first episode is about leaving the nest, while others are about building homes, locating food and finding mates. In each episode we jump between different animals around the world as we see what their species does.
It feels natural to compare any nature documentary to the fare from legend David Attenborough, but The Secret Lives does things a bit differently. In fact, after watching several episodes of the ten-episode season, I realized that I preferred Apple's show to the likes of Our Planet or Planet Earth for a few reasons.
My first reason is about how refreshing the structure is. Almost every nature doc that I can recall seeing recently centers each episode around a different biome: you'll have the desert week, the ocean week, the rainforest week and so on. There's nothing wrong with this format but I'm personally not as interested in insects or sea creatures so often find myself skipping weeks.
Plus, by putting disparate animals from around the world into episodes side-by-side, it makes some interesting connections that you wouldn't see if the selection of creatures was limited by geography.
In the first episode our first three animals are a fur seal pup trying to survive the sea, a basilisk lizard which escapes danger by running on water and a killifish which can leap over land to change streams by flicking its strong tail. Without the script having to say a word about it, we see the different ways that bodies of water can be life or death for different creatures.
A second, more subjective reason that I like The Secret Lives is that the ratio of cute animals to non-cute ones is heavily weighted towards the former. I see so many nature shows which cause me to keep thinking "wow, that's ugly" and I didn't have that in The Secret Lives of Animals. Instead I kept falling in love with the different creatures like the aforementioned fur seal or a mob of meerkat pups or even ducks living in Iceland. The way the animals were filmed (and color graded, I noticed) really helped!
But the most important reason I preferred The Secret Lives of Animals is that it's simply a gentler show. Titles like Our Planet or Planet Earth feel a bit too much like Game of Thrones for my liking — it seems that, at any moment, nature might take a brutal course and murder something cute and fluffy. I'm aware that this is how the animal kingdom functions in reality, but this isn't reality — it's TV.
Watching The Secret Lives, I can be safe in the knowledge that the mouse I've been learning about, isn't about to become dinner for a hungry owl. (Like I said, I'm only part way in, and I hope this doesn't change! Maybe I'll skip the last episode, about old age...)
Maybe I've just seen too many murders and killings on screen through 2024, but a nice worry-free show about the wonders of the world is just what I needed ahead of Christmas.
I'm not going to stop watching other animal shows because I'm squeamish about the fates of these creatures, but these three reasons made The Secret Lives of Animals a nice breath of fresh air compared to many other nature shows you can watch right now. I'd recommend it!
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