Coming on the heels of the popular History Channel special, Life After People, comes Life After People: The Series.
Building off the success of the HISTORY™ feature-length special, Life After People, this series continues the exploration of a world wiped clean of humanity, in even more vivid detail. Each episode is a stunningly graphic examination of how the very landscape of planet Earth would change in our absence, using cinematic CGI to reveal – in scientific detail – the fate of every aspect of the man-made world. What happens to the millions of animals that supply our food? The chemicals stored in industrial complexes? Which animals take over subways? Do satellites fall to Earth? When does Mt. Rushmore wither away?
This collection includes all ten episodes from the first season (though, I’m not exactly sure if there is a season two in production or not), each one covering a specific topic in a world without humans and thoroughly investigating it. Each episode follows the same format: they start with minutes without people, then hours, days, weeks, months, and years. Every episode is pretty interesting, but the subject matter gets a little boring after about half way through the season. Life After People I thought worked great as a feature-length special, but I just don’t feel that there’s enough interesting topics to keep an audience engaged in an entire series.
It’s not that the idea itself isn’t interesting in Life After People: The Series it’s more that it seems to be the same things said in every episode -even though each episode supposedly covers a different topic. Whether it be New York City finally collapsing, breweries and oil refineries exploding, or oceans over-taking land, it all has the same result and the same theme: everything is going to eventually be destroyed and nature will reclaim the earth. Another issue is the way the time table is handled as each episode progresses. The episodes start off jumping from minutes to hours to days to weeks, etc. But then the jumps become bigger, jumping from 10,000 years to 100,000 years to a million years. It seems a bit pointless and perhaps would have been better to just jump straight to a million years, foregoing the 10,000 and 100,000 year marks. The jumps seem awkward and at a million years the viewer will assumed what is showcased in the previous marks happened and doesn’t necessarily need to be shown.
The series isn’t terrible though. Every episode had several moments that had me incredibly interested or fascinated. While as a whole they all seemed repetitive, there are several facts and speculations that will keep most History Channel fans interested. The CGI is pretty good as far as what you’d expect on History and illustrates the points the narrator is making very well -as well as helps in keeping everything visually appealing. This comes into play in what was probably my favorite episode, “Heavy Metal”, in which the destruction of New York City and the Gateway Arch occurs.
Overall, if you are a fan of History Channel series, then Life After People: The Series should be pretty entertaining for you and I give it a mild recommendation. Though, if you don’t have eight hours to dedicate to it, then the original Life After People feature-length special may be a better alternative for you. Either way, I suggest checking at least one of these formats of Life After People out. Unfortunately, no special features are included in this set.
Life After People: The Series: The Complete Season One is available not on DVD over at Amazon.