Sick of human reality TV? Alex Casey has found a perfect solution in David Attenborough’s latest.
I’m know I’m not alone when I say this: humans are bleaking me out at the moment. Turn on the news for the bleakest updates imaginable. Try to numb the pain with Married at First Sight and you’re greeted with the bleakest men trying to out-bleak each other. Open your phone and find a bleak sponsored post for Cruskits (“busy day? Quick lunch”) and a bleak AI video of an ancient crone transforming into a young beautiful woman for her America’s Got Talent audition.
If you too need a break from humanity, I can highly recommend hanging out with the stars of Mammals, the latest David Attenborough joint which has just finished airing on Sunday nights on TVNZ. With each episode themed around different living conditions of mammals across the world – “heat”, “cold”, “dark”, “water” – there have been countless moments that have left me more aghast and entertained than any rose ceremony or Treasure Island elimination.
For example, in the “new wild” episode, Attenborough’s team follows a large family of otters which has adapted to life on the bustling city streets of Singapore. But when the loud traffic drowns out their usual method of communicating while crossing the busy roads, one of them becomes separated from the pack and can’t hear where they are. What transpires is a moving Babe 2: Pig in the City style adventure full of peril, sadness and a tearful joyous reunion.
That’s not to say that it’s all happy endings because, of course, bleak humans have ruined everything for everyone. In the final “forest” episode, we see howler monkeys in South America who are being accidentally electrocuted in their thousands thanks to uninsulated wires encroaching on their natural habitat. As a baby howler clung onto its recently-deceased mother in confusion, I let out a guttural wail usually only reserved for wholesome over-50s weddings on MAFS.
The intense emotional images are not helped by David Attenborough’s singular warbling voice, which sounds more and more like he is always about to cry with every passing year. And who can blame him? Every storyline, no matter how cute or curious, ends in the same way. Whether it’s the lemur forced to live inside a tree due to soaring temperatures, or the wolves forced to dodge a field of land mines: their lives are now hell, and it’s all because of us.
That’s why this serial avoider prefers the stories located as far away from human interference as possible, where devious whales slip into undercover boss mode as pretend dolphins in the Pacific Ocean, and the Damaraland mole rats live in total darkness in the Kalahari Desert. If you thought Alone put people under the pump, wait until you meet the wolverine covering 50 miles a day in the hunt for a humble morsel of moose meat.
And don’t even get me started on the star-nosed mole, whose overall Zoidberg-inspired look really gives the AI-generated crone on Instagram a run for her money in the fake stakes.
While you can revel in a human-free world for the majority of each episode, the final “Making of Mammals” segment follows the experience of Attenborough’s crew out there in the wilderness. It is jarring at first for the eye to transition from the silky sheen of a sea lion to the crumpled nylon of a human cargo short, but you’ll soon forget once you witness the tireless days, weeks and months that can go into capturing a single shot or interaction.
There’s also plenty of peril and tragedy here. While on the hunt for lemurs hiding in tree trunks in Madagascar, one crew gets lost in the forest and finds themselves going around in circles. As they get more and more anxious, verbalising how long a human can last without water in the heat, it is hard not to think about The Blair Witch Project. Elsewhere in the Kalahari Desert, the hunt for a rare mole rat initially yields only tiny deceased furry bodies – needlessly killed by humans.
But before you switch off entirely and move deep into a tree trunk yourself, Mammals provides crucial moments of hope. There’s the local team stringing up alternate routes to stop the howler monkeys getting electrocuted on the wires, or the local scientists who successfully manage to tag a camera on a false killer whale with whoops and cheers. “Commitment from passionate individuals on the ground does make a difference,” Attenborough warbles in the closing moments.
“If we continue to share knowledge and protect the environment, there can be hope for the future of all mammals – including ourselves.”