NatGeo’s riveting series Hostile Planet puts you in the center of the action

Enlarge / "This is not your mother's natural history series." Host Bear Grylls filming in the Swiss Pennine Alps for the "Mountains" episode of National Geographic's new series, Hostile Planet. (credit: National Geographic/Oliver Clague)

It's more than an hour into a whale-watching excursion organized to promote National Geographic's new six-part series, Hostile Planet, and folks are starting to get restless. We saw our first Pacific gray whale before we'd even left the harbor. It swam right up to the boat to give us a good, long look at its telltale gray-white pattern over dark slate-gray skin. But now we're in the open sea with not a whale in sight.

According to Executive Producer Tom Hugh-Jones (Planet Earth II), it's just the tiniest taste of what it was like shooting this visually arresting series-except the intrepid camera crews and producers weren't sipping mimosas on a balmy 70-degree day in March off the coast of Malibu as they waited for the animals to show themselves. It took months of preparation followed by weeks of tracking various species, all to capture that perfect unexpected shot. They endured the same extreme conditions as the animals, for more than 1,300 days of filming, on all seven continents. Out of the resulting 1,800 hours of footage came the six segments of Hostile Planet, each focusing on a distinctive biome: "Mountains," "Oceans," "Grasslands," "Jungles," "Deserts," and "Polar."

(Some spoilers for the series below.)

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