Why NBC Decided to Bring Natural History to Broadcast TV With ‘The Americas’

variety.com:

Michael Schneider Variety Editor at Large Back in the early days of the broadcast networks, natural history shows were a part of the programming diet: NBC ran “Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom” for much of the 1960s, and around that time ABC brought “The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau” to U.S.

audiences. Over the past several decades, however, those kinds of programs mostly became the domain of PBS (“Nature”) and cablers like Discovery (“Planet Earth”).

More recently, streamers like Netflix (“Our Planet”) entered the space. With a few exceptions (Fox’s “Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey”), the broadcast nets have shied away from documentary-style nature events — which makes NBC’s current stab at one, “The Americas,” all the more notable. “It is an experiment,” says Toby Gorman, the president of Universal Television Alternative Studio. “We will learn a lot.

But when I think about the hits of broadcast, it’s got to be four quadrant,” he adds, referring to the need to hit every demographic. “We talk about that a lot in our world, and I can’t think of something that defines ‘four-quadrant’ better than a big, blue-chip natural history project.” Narrated by Tom Hanks and boasting a score by Hans Zimmer, the 10-episode “The Americas” debuted Feb.