Around the second decade of working in science communication, you stop expecting TV to amaze you. You’ve seen the flashy CGI, the big orchestral scores, and the host standing in front of something huge and strange while speaking in carefully timed rhythms of awe. You already know the answer. What then comes along and takes it apart without making a sound, and you find yourself leaning forward. It was kind of like that when the BBC showed Evolution on BBC Two earlier this month.
You can watch the show with Chris Packham, and the choice makes more sense as you watch. British broadcasters have been looking for “the next Attenborough” for a long time and with some worry. However, their search has always been a little off-target. David Attenborough is 100 years old and still works, which is pretty amazing. He is unique, and any attempt to directly replace him usually ends up with a pale copy. Packham is not like other people. He is charming without being too smooth, and he is enthusiastic without acting excited. He hacks open a termite mound in Kenya with the excitement of someone who is really excited about what’s inside, which is harder to fake on camera than most people think.
What really makes Evolution unique isn’t the great cinematography or the almost perfect CGI reconstruction of ancient life. The show talks about evolutionary theory directly and without any apologies. It talks about the science behind it, not just the show that comes from it. Both natural history and evolutionary biology have been kept separate at the BBC for a long time, which is a bit strange. Some of the best wildlife footage ever put on film was made by the Natural History Unit in Bristol. In London, the Science Unit came up with great ideas. Both of them always seemed less connected than they should have been. Evolution is finally the show that fills in that gap.
A question that seems so simple at first: how did the elephant become an elephant? This is how the first episode starts. The answer goes back four billion years and includes the idea of LUCA, the Last Universal Common Ancestor, which is a single-celled organism that all living things on Earth are thought to have descended from. It also goes forward and includes the constantly changing, branching, and new ideas producing process of natural selection. It’s ambitious in a way that good science TV doesn’t do very often these days. It has faith in the audience.
This might be what the BBC does best, and it might have always done this best when it has the freedom to do so. Not following trends or responding to streaming services, but instead committing to the kind of slow, careful, genuinely educational programming that takes years to make and can’t be copied by an algorithm that wants people to watch more. Yes, the production is very fancy. That being said, the intellectual seriousness that lies beneath it is what stays.
When I watch Evolution, I get the sense that something long overdue has finally come to pass. For years, the BBC has had to deal with tight budgets, political backlash, and existential questions about its future. In some places, people always talk about cuts, and the conversation never ends. But this show is a reminder of what the license fee can do for an institution that plays to its strengths. Not in a boastful, overused way that word is used a lot in press releases; groundbreaking in the truest sense of the word. There is a movement below.
Chris Packham never worked as a scientist for a living. Attenborough was not either. However, both have done more to make people aware of evolutionary ideas than most researchers in the field could reasonably claim. That’s not a little thing. In its own quiet way, that is amazing.
