BBC America continues to transform its weekend lineup into Wonderstruck, a showcase for British-produced documentaries such as “Planet Earth” and “Blue Planet,” many of them narrated by the extraordinary naturalist Sir David Attenborough.
On Tuesday, the network announced it would expand that programming beginning April 2 to two days a week and launch a free digital companion site, Wonderstrucktv.com, offering short-form videos that the network described as “anxiety-easing content.”
In a slightly more salacious vein, Discovery Channel will premiere “Legends of the Wild,” a new series that features a pair of wilderness experts, Damian Duffy and Matt Hoffman, investigating “mysteries of the natural world,” including trips to Brazil, Australia and the Philippines. (Discovery, of course, is the flagship in a lineup of networks that also includes Animal Planet.)
Netflix has also gotten into the game, with such series as “Our Planet” and “Night on Earth,” the latter taking advantage of dazzling technical advancements — as many of these recent programs do — to present night-vision images of animals’ nocturnal activities in a way that couldn’t be captured previously.
Finally, there’s National Geographic, which has ordered its own ambitious series such as “Hostile Planet,” offering an array of programs both on its linear network and via Disney+.
TV programming can obviously only do so much. But with communal experiences in short supply, and emotional health being tested, that sounds like a pretty good prescription for what ails us right now.
“Elephant” and “Dolphin Reef” premiere April 3 on Disney+, and “Legends of the Wild” premieres April 1 at 10 p.m. on Discovery Channel.