The Best of David Attenborough & Where to Stream It
Happy 100th Birthday to David Attenborough. We mark his centenary with a list of where his best specials can be found on streaming.
Happy Birthday and a hallowed centenary to naturalist Sir David Attenborough, who has managed to pull off what Queen Elizabeth II couldn’t: living into the triple digits. Perhaps this is the planet’s way of thanking him for his 80+ years of service in honoring the natural world by bringing it to living rooms around the world. Attenborough himself claims he expected to spend the day “quietly,” and is touched how many of us had other ideas:
“I’ve been completely overwhelmed by birthday greetings from preschool groups to care home residents and countless individuals and families of all ages. I simply can’t reply to each of you all separately, but I would like to thank you all most sincerely for your kind messages, and wish those of you who have planned your own local events a very happy day.”
Whatever we have to thank for Attenborough’s longevity, he seems to show no sign of stopping, with Green Planet II in the works for 2027, and two major releases happening as part of his birthday celebrations, including the retrospective Making Life on Earth (available on PBS), and a five-episode deep dive into the nature we find in our own backyards in Secret Garden (still in need of American distribution).
However, there are plenty of David Attenborough specials to watch – the man has been making nature documentaries for the BBC since the early 1950s; these things add up. Moreover, the BBC hasn’t been shy about co-producing with various companies over the decades, so its nature documentaries and docu-series are available on multiple streaming services. As we head into the weekend, here are the main streaming services to check out if you’re looking to stream something in celebration.
Life on Earth Series
While PBS has the lookback on the making of Life on Earth, BritBox has all the episodes of the real deal: the groundbreaking nature special series from 1979. Well, it’s actually BBC Select that has them, as well as many of Attenborough’s British-and-all-ages-audience-oriented series, like David Attenborough’s Natural Curiosities, which runs six 30-minute episodes a season. If you want to see how far ahead, technology-wise, Attenborough was working in the 1970s, as well as a helluva time capsule of what we considered ethical for naturalists, it’s absolutely worth it.
The Life on Earth series and many lesser-known Attenborough specials can be streamed on BBC Select as part of BritBox’s Premiere tier.
Planet Earth Series
BBC America never had that much British programming, having to rely on Patrick Stewart to excuse old reruns of Star Trek: The Next Generation and “Jamie Bamber is Secretly British!” for Battlestar Galactica. But through all the upheaval of the last decade, the network has held onto the rights to air all of Attenborough’s Planet Earth series (including Blue Planet and Frozen Planet). However, BBC America doesn’t actually have a streaming service, so to stream Attenborough’s other groundbreaking nature special series, this time from 2001, you’ll need to subscribe to AMC+.
All serials from the Planet Earth series, including Blue Planet, Frozen Planet, and Green Planet, are streaming on AMC+.
Nature
Speaking of PBS and the Making Life on Earth special, it’s not on BritBox because of Attenborough’s longest-running co-production agreement with the PBS brand Nature. PBS originally aired Life on Earth in the U.S. as a standalone in 1982, and its success in the U.K. inspired the creation of the Nature brand that same year (not unlike how the 1967 The Forsyte Saga directly led to Masterpiece).
However, it wasn’t until Blue Planet went to BBC America in 2001, heralding the Planet Earth series, that PBS realized it had to get serious about having Attenborough on public TV. Since then, Attenborough has appeared in episodes of Nature nearly every season, many of which are currently available to stream on the various PBS streaming options.
Nature is available to stream on PBS Passport for members and on the PBS Documentaries Prime Video Channel. The Making Life on Earth special is also available on the PBS app.
Prehistoric Planet Series
As has become apparent in the last year, Apple TV sees itself as the heir apparent to the high-end premium TV crown that HBO is currently being forced to vacate. While most of its natural world series are BBC Earth knockoffs, it did land a few actual BBC Earth co-productions with Attenborough by agreeing to one of his other passion projects: Dinosaurs. The Prehistoric Planet Series isn’t as robust as some of his others, but what it lacks in number of episodes, it more than makes up for in sheer nerding out over fossils.
All seasons of the Prehistoric Planet series are available to stream on Apple TV.
Our Planet Series
The multiple landslide Tory elections in the late 2010s created a real fear in the U.K. that the BBC’s days were numbered, just as climate change moved from the “thing that everyone says will happen if we don’t do something” column to “oops, too late.” It put Attenborough at odds with the BBC brass, who wanted to tone down declarations of climate emergency just as Attenborough decided that staying quiet was immoral. The result was Attenborough joining up with Netflix to make the Our Planet series, with a promise he needn’t worry about “toning down the rhetoric.” Attenborough doesn’t hold back either, showing some of the true horrors climate change is wreaking on our beloved world.
All seasons of the Our Planet series are available to stream on Netflix.
Dynasties Series
HBO Max may spend most of its marketing efforts promoting the HBO programming on its service, but the original intent when the “everything and the kitchen sink” streaming service was launched was that it had all the Warner Media programming, including TNT sports and wrestling, and all the Discovery-owned networks’ programming, too. That means HBO also has the Planet Earth series (though not all of it) and some of Attenborough’s one-offs, which can also be found on PBS, BritBox, and AMC+. But the one Attenborough series HBO Max has that cannot be found on another service is Dynasties. The series focuses on a variety of species from around the planet that have inhabited it since before the dawn of man, but whose continued existence is not threatened by climate change.
Both seasons of the Dynasties Series are available on HBO Max.
Oceans with David Attenborough
One would have assumed that at some point, America’s homegrown National Geographic and David Attenborough would have managed to collaborate on something. However, it was only in the 2020s that NatGeo’s parent company, Disney, realized this had somehow never materialized. Despite having a ton of nature-focused programming, Disney+ currently has only one Attenborough title as of this writing, the big-budget film Oceans with David Attenborough. However, it turns out that if you take the typical budget for a six-part series and use it all on 90 minutes of film, the results are pretty damn breathtaking. This is a quality-over-quantity situation, and the film more than makes up for being the streaming service’s lone offering.
Oceans with David Attenborough is streaming on Disney+ under the National Geographic brand, and is also available on Hulu for those who still have it as a standalone service.
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