Hostile Planet

National Geographic, 8.30pm Sunday

Remember in 2011 when near-identical romcoms Friends With Benefits and

No Strings Attached came out within months of each other? Always a sign of the times when that happens. We can all agree that 2011 was a more carefree, sexy time than 2019, where we now have two near-identical nature documentaries about the perilous state of life on Earth within weeks of each other.

Hostile Planet on National Geographic, like Sir David Attenborough’s Our Planet on Netflix, illustrates the stark reality of global warming with traumatic images of animals falling off cliffs. The first episode cold opens with a starving snow leopard tumbling down a steep rock face in a desperate attempt to find something to eat.

If that’s not enough to have you fumbling for the remote going "you know what, this might not be for me", what happens next may be even more confronting: Bear bloody Grylls shows up.

“I’m two miles above sea level!” he shouts at us from a mountain two miles above sea level. “It is cold, desolate,” he puffs, “hard to breathe.”

Get down from there then if it’s so hard to breathe! Honestly. The man’s an absolute liability.

Thing is, though, unless they start making Sir David sleep in a cryo chamber or do some kind of AI voice cloning on him, he’s not going to be around to voice our nature docos forever. He needs an heir. And that heir could be Bear Grylls.

He doesn’t have the same gravitas, not yet — hard to have any gravitas at all when you’re most famous for drinking your own wee. But this is a pretty strong audition nonetheless.

With cinematography by Guillermo Navarro (Pan’s Labyrinth), Hostile Planet is certainly visually stunning — just please don’t even think about putting it on the display TVs at Harvey Norman.