Bigger Than ‘Planet Earth’? Creative Team Behind ‘The Americas’ Talk Working With Tom Hanks & Hitting Career Highs On NBC’s Most Expensive Unscripted Project Of All Time

deadline.com:

Bigger than Planet Earth? The Americas just might be. That is the verdict from the creative team behind NBC‘s Tom Hanks-narrated landmark, which comes from the storied BBC Studios Natural History Unit (NHU).

NBCUniversal has already called The Americas – which counts Hans Zimmer as composer – the most expensive unscripted project in its history.

These natural history epics were once the preserve of the BBC, which commissioned the likes of Blue Planet and Planet Earth, but the streamers and American nets have gotten into the game in a big way.

Rather than greenlighting The Americas, the BBC has instead acquired the show, demonstrating how the landscape has changed. When BBC Studios Creative Director Mike Gunton first met with NBC to pitch the show years back, he says the American net wanted to “get into the big unscripted space… they were saying, ‘Let’s do a statement’.” “We wanted to follow up from Planet Earth with something that wasn’t Planet Earth but had the same scale,” The Americas EP Gunton told Deadline. “At first I couldn’t think of anything that could do that and then I thought, ‘Has anyone done the extraordinary collection between North and South America.