2023 - 2023
Planet Earth 3 aired on BBC One and BBC iPlayer from October to December 2023. Eight episodes. Six years in the making. It is the third chapter of the BBC nature documentary strand that began with Planet Earth in 2006 and continued with Planet Earth II in 2016, the two titles now widely treated as the benchmark against which every later wildlife series is measured.
Sir David Attenborough narrates, aged 97 at airing. If you expected a diminished final bow, you will not find one here. He sounds, if anything, more present than in 2016. The voice is slower, yes, and the breath between sentences a little longer. The authority is intact.
The eight episodes split the planet up by biome. "Coasts" opens the run, followed by "Ocean", "Deserts and Grasslands", "Freshwater", "Forests", "Extremes", "Human", and "Heroes". The final chapter is deliberate. After seven hours of animals dealing with a world that is warming, retreating, burning and flooding, the finale is a hopeful chapter built around conservation wins.
The executive producer is Mike Gunton of BBC Studios Natural History Unit. If you have watched any serious British wildlife series in the last 20 years, his name is on it somewhere. BBC NHU remains the gold standard in the genre by a distance that is frankly a bit embarrassing for everybody else.
The score is composed by Hans Zimmer, Jacob Shea and Sara Barone, now the established house team for the franchise after their work on Planet Earth II and the Frozen Planet II follow-up. The musical DNA is consistent across all three outings. Swelling strings for a baby iguana outrunning racer snakes. A plaintive piano motif for a shot of drought-cracked earth. Occasional anthemic brass when a grand wide shot of a mountain range wants to feel like a cathedral.
Attenborough is the authorial figurehead of the whole thing, not simply the narrator. Every framing choice is shaped around his voice. He is the reason the series is not a CGI-heavy spectacle or a Netflix-style talking-head essay. The BBC NHU house style is patient camera work and animal-as-protagonist story structure. No cutaway interviews with scientists explaining things at you. The camera stays on the animal. The narrator tells you what it is doing. You work out the rest yourself.
The climate theme is the big evolution from 2006. The original Planet Earth could plausibly treat the planet as stable and the wildlife as eternal. That posture was already strained by Planet Earth II. By 2023 it is no longer available. Planet Earth 3 has climate change written into the fabric of every episode, not as a lecture but as the visible condition of the world the animals are living in.
Hans Zimmer
Composer
Nick Lyon
Episode Producer
Paul Thompson
Executive Producer
Sara Barone
Composer
Sir David Attenborough
Narrator
Mike Gunton
Executive Producer
Matthew Wright
Series Producer
Jonathan Smith
Producer
Glaciers retreat that are meant to be there. Coral bleaches when it was not supposed to. And animals are timing their migrations to seasons that have quietly moved on them. The camera records all of it without raising its voice.
The tonal hallmarks of a BBC NHU wildlife series are still intact here:
The "Human" episode is the most editorially interesting in my view, and the point at which the series takes its clearest position. The animals are not merely adapting to a changing environment. They are adapting to us. The camera does not shout about this. It does not need to.
Visually, Planet Earth 3 is the most technically accomplished of the three. Drone work lets the camera move in ways that were never available on the 2006 series. Low-light cameras pick up nocturnal behaviour that previously lived only in IR monochrome. The underwater work in "Ocean" is the equal of anything in the Blue Planet sister franchise, with camera teams shooting off Antarctic ice shelves, across Galapagos reef systems, and down to mid-Atlantic seamounts most viewers will never otherwise see. Production hit 43 countries and six continents across the six years, which is the kind of logistical effort you do not get on streaming-era wildlife series built to commission quickly and look expensive on a trailer.
Atmospherically, the series is a little heavier than its predecessors. The 2016 outing felt like a celebration. This one feels, fairly, like a reckoning. The tone is not grim. It is grown-up. You can feel the production team wrestling with the responsibility of making a wildlife show in an era in which wildlife is, empirically, running out of space.
Some critics felt the overt climate messaging was a positive evolution, an honest response to a world that has changed. Others felt the franchise's earlier restraint, letting the images do the work, was more effective. I am with the first camp but I understand the second. You can see the argument play out inside the series itself, which sometimes raises its voice and sometimes does not.
Critical reception was broadly warm. The Guardian and Telegraph both gave it strong reviews. The consensus is that the BBC NHU standard remains untouchable and that Planet Earth 3 extends the lineage without surpassing Planet Earth II, which is still widely treated as the series peak. Episode 7, "Human", and episode 8, "Heroes", drew the most commentary, for opposite reasons. One for confrontational framing, the other for deliberate optimism.
Viewers latched onto specific sequences that demand rewatching. A long painted dogs hunt from "Extremes". A drought-stricken elephant family where the matriarch digs wells in the dry riverbed to save the calves. The kind of single-scene filmmaking that has always been the franchise's trademark.
The franchise keeps doing what it has always done, which is convince a mainstream television audience that animals are worth watching for an hour at a time. That alone is worth something. Nobody else is doing it at this level. Nobody else has tried very hard.
The animals are the protagonists. The narrator trusts you. The camera waits.
That is the BBC NHU formula in one line, and Planet Earth 3 honours it. Attenborough at 97 is still the best guide on television to what a wild animal is actually doing. The photography is better than ever. The climate theme is handled with the weight it deserves and without becoming a lecture.
It is not the strongest of the three. Planet Earth II remains the peak. But Planet Earth 3 is the more honest of the two, and in a decade when honest is the thing that is in shortest supply, that counts for a lot.
Jacob Shea
Composer
Theo Webb
Producer