Why Life on our Planet FAILED

This series managed to do the unthinkable: 1- It made dinosaurs boring 2- It made Morgan Freeman boring

What I hate most about this documentary is that it promotes this idea that the different branches of the evolutionary tree are "dynasties" vying for control against each other over the world, which is only true to a degree. Because the documentary is so obsessed with pushing this "dynasties" idea, it unfortunately has to continue downplaying many prehistoric species just to hype up new ones. In a way, it's actually the exact same problem the Walking with Trilogy suffered from.

Apart from the inaccuracies, the lack of focus is what bothered me the most. They clearly wanted to glory hunt on the positive reception of Prehistoric Planet but they didn't want to pay as much. So to save money they came up with the idea of mixing CGI with modern day footage. This meant they couldn't portray a specific time period in the past so they made the show about 'ALL LIFE EVER' instead, which is just too vague a theme to be interesting.

That scene with the cave lions and the mammoths irked me so much. A lot of us have seen clips of elephants going all out on rhino, crocs, buffalo, lion, and other animals that bother them. If they wanna flatten you, they're gonna do it. The mammoths acted as if all they could do to defend was to just lazily flay their trunks a few times. I know the herd had a calf to shield but again, we know what an angry elephant is capable of.

The main thing I hated was how they made every herbivore weaker than a literal piece of glass, and the carnivores are all more powerful than the Jurassic Park dinosaurs

This show felt like it was written and directed by a person who had watched the trilogy of life as a child, now with millions of dabloons, setting out to create a show from their fuzzy memories. Trying to make everything seem as grand as the former, with not understanding what made them so great. Good vid by the way.

I feel this show is emblematic of all Netflix’s worst flaws - never quite giving the budget to do something properly, chasing short term hype in favour of sustained engagement, and dumping and running after release.

I actually remember the exact place in the show I stopped watching it. It was just after the Lystrosaurus scene, and they went into the ocean, and since we were still in the early Triassic, I was like, "Yes, finally some Triassic marine life!"...and then it jumped ahead, skipping the entire rest of the Triassic (my favourite geological period) and showed a Pliosaur instead. I can't exactly place why that jump bothered me so much, but I just lost interest at that point completely. For the most part though, it was the modern day segments dragging on that killed it for me, especially as it gave me a lot of 'Alien Worlds' flashbacks, another Netflix documentary which handled a very similar thing even worse than this show did.

i’m not even a huge fan of prehistoric plants but it was actually insane to me that they didn’t bring up archaeopteris when they were talking about trees and instead chose to focus on redwoods. i think that was the moment i decided to drop the show. so many missed opportunities

When I watched the first two episodes, I immediately had the same issue you did with the show constantly focusing on so-called “dynasties”. It grossly misrepresents evolution as an arms race when in reality there is no set direction or “best” adaptations.

The Lystrosaurus/Erythrosuchus scene also shows a number of what are plainly stonecrops, cudweed, and broom plants with visible flowers in the background despite being set in the Triassic.

I’m a complete layperson but a couple years ago I heard of “survival of the good-enough” and ever since I wished this sentence was taught instead of “survival of the fittest”; it’s much more intuitive snd doesn’t carry any different modern meanings the way “fitness” does, and it’d make shows like this, which misrepresent evolutionary fitness, more difficult to exist

So this was the video that you strained your eyes editing. I found myself just so excited for a new prehistoric doc after PHP that I completely overlooked stuff at the beginning. Like, Erythrosuchus being included at all blinded me to how poorly it was portrayed. But towards the end I got tired of it, I never even finished the mammals episode after seeing the terror bird scene again.

Speaking of t-rex hunts portrayed in media, i personally like the hunting scene on the original WWD. It's not only or simply because of both the Tyrannosaurus and Edmontosaurus portrayed, but the tremors, branches and sticks breaking, scattered dust all around, all from the battle between hunter and prey, both gigantic, along with the cameraman tries to take a nice shot while trying to follow them, as if he couldn't properly film the scene.

There were two scenes that i highly enjoyed: the Arthropleura finding a mate and the young Smilodon interacting with the Doedicurus. I did not enjoy any Dinosaur scenes despite them being the main marketing point for the show.

The Allosaurus and diplodocus night storm hunt is actually pretty well handled, if you manage to look past the inaccuracies in the designs of the creatures.

There are other issues with the Smilodon and Titanis scene: the Smilodon have faces too similar to that of pantherines (when sabretooths had a smaller degree of binocular vision, and longer and more laterally compressed muzzles to facilitate their specialized shearing killing bite-something that, ironically, terror birds also independently evolved), the phorusrhacids are misproportioned in general and are missing the sickle claw, and the habitat is blatantly wrong for Titanis (it was not an open-country animal; in fact none of the larger phorusrhacids were). Edit: if you really do want a Titanis vs. sabretoothed cat scene, you could go with the (then) Jaguar-sized Xenosmilus: the bird would still have a significant size advantage, but not quite to the point of being a Hopeless Boss Fight like S. gracilis vs. Titanis was in reality. Or even better, set the scene in the Early Pliocene-Titanis was already in North America even before the GABI (it actually evolved there), and at this point it was significantly smaller than it would become during the Late Pliocene and Early Pleistocene. You could have a matchup between Megantereon (ancestor of S. gracilis and similar in size) and the smaller Early Pleistocene ecomorph of Titanis, for example over a kill or territory, for example. THAT would be an even fight between two well-armed, sophisticated predators of similar sizes (the bird having better stamina but the cat being a better grappler, which evens things out further).

I think the scenes of smilodon hunting could have worked if the terror birds were juveniles, and if the young mammoth was already injured or weakened before the hunters arrived. It could have been a good way to show the mammoths caring for the juvenile until they absolutely had to move on with the migration. With the terror birds, they could have shown them teaming up to distract a watchful parent or two to snag their chicks.

I listed everything I found wrong with LOOP on a Reddit post: -LOOP kept flip-flopping between a gloss-over summary of prehistory and trying to tie in modern animals. -It also flip-flops between being a normie show with newbie-level paleontology and making off-hand paleo-nerd-level references. My dad was confused by the one-off mention of the Carnian Pluvial Episode, and I had to bring up a PBS Eons video to explain it to him. -It seemed to simultaneously cram the entire Phanerozoic into 8 hours while also padding it out with modern filler. -The flip-flopping between the present and the past made it seem unfocused (not to mention flip-flopping between points in prehistory). -Pliosaurs died out at the early Cretaceous, they did not make it to the K-PG event. -The Ordovician, Devonian, Permian, Cretaceous, and Holocene extinctions were gushed over in detail, while the end-Triassic extinction was just a footnote. -Speaking of extinctions, the Devonian extinction was basically depicted as being caused by a giant algae bloom, rather than the more probable cause of Volcanic activity. -The last episode had this weird Misanthropic undertone when humans appeared (though the Buffalo Jump scene was the only good part of the episode). -The show in general sacrificed depth in favor of scope, and it shows. It almost feels like a bait-and-switch.

This crushes me how Life on Our Planet wasn’t as good as I expected and hoped :(