Review of the ‘Mammals’ episode of Life.

All nature shows anthropomorphize their subjects, often to the degree that they tell us as much about our values and morals as they do about animals. And so it is that Life, the successor to Planet Earth now appearing on the Discovery Channel, tells us an awful lot about Oprah Winfrey’s values and morals.

Winfrey narrates the show and appears to have influenced its content as well, if its ‘girl power’ overtones and fixation on motherhood are any indication. While the show’s visuals are spectacular, its writing is weak, especially when compared to more cerebral nature programs like David Attenborough’s Life of Mammals. Life’s script is light on science and heavy on generalisms. Whereas Attenborough would tell you why an elephant shrew evolved nipples on its front as opposed to its underside (the answer: so that it can feed its young and still remain in a position to sprint off should danger appear),  Winfrey merely  gushes about how the shrew’s “maternal instincts” make it devoted to its babies.

‘Mammals,’ definitely the weakest of the four Life episodes so far, is sometimes so lightweight that its scenes come off not as illuminating segments about animals but as parables. Most of these parables are about motherhood and gender: a scene of a reindeer herd escaping a swarm of mosquitoes, for instance, turns into a cautionary tale about child abduction, as one female loses her baby in the scuffle. “The mother may search for her kid for days,” Winfrey intones over footage of the female bleating in panic, “but she won’t see it again—not alive. Predators have already gotten to the baby.” Hear that, Vixen? You’re a negligent mother. You left your child alone for two seconds, and see what happened?

Then, as if to provide a foil for deadbeat Vixen, we get a series of vignettes about good animal moms: a seal who teaches her calf to swim; an elephant struggling to free her baby from a mud hole (Grandma Elephant—I kid you not—comes by to save the day); a polar bear who (in a scene that tells us nothing new whatsoever about polar bears, but does manage to introduce the specter of global warming) considers fighting off competitors to get her cubs a piece of beached whale meat.

On Wednesdays, we wear tan.

There’s also a scene about rival cliques – I mean, lionesses and hyenas. A starving hyena tries to move in on a carcass some lions are chomping on, with the predictable result that they chase her off. The hyena alerts its pack, who outnumber the lions, run them up a tree, and take the carcass for themselves. A pretty typical scene out on the savannah, you’d think, but Life’s script turns it into something out of Mean Girls. The female gender of the combatants is mentioned prominently; the hyena is described as greedy (“She shouldn’t have tried to eat that,” Winfrey even says, as if chiding the animal for not being sufficiently diet-conscious) and her summoning the pack is construed as revenge.

This silly reduction of animal behavior to mini-morality plays isn’t fair to Life’s videographers, who brought both incredible talent (my husband, no slouch in the photography department himself, was consistently agape at the shots they managed to capture) and grueling hard work to this series. (Thankfully, the other three episodes to air so far aren’t nearly as egregious as ‘Mammals,’ perhaps because it’s harder to see yourself as a fish or a lizard than as a cute meerkat.) And it’s not fair to the viewers who tuned in hoping to learn something about the natural world and only got an Oprah-style lecture about parenting instead.