Netflix’s ‘Our Great National Parks’: TV Review

Generally, the presidency of the United States has been a professional pinnacle achieved by venerable men with no expectation that a post-presidential career would ever be necessary.

There are occasional exceptions. William Howard Taft, too often reduced to an apocryphal story of getting stuck in the White House bathtub, served as chief justice of the Supreme Court. Jimmy Carter, still continuing his 41-year “retirement,” has written dozens of books, won a Nobel Peace Prize and contributed to the building of countless homes for Habitat for Humanity.

More frequently, though, former presidents set up their libraries, perform general “statesman” duties and paint, usually poorly.

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Fun fact I learned today: When Barack Obama left the White House in 2017, he was 55 years and 169 days old, exactly one day younger than Taft when he wrapped his lone term. I know this, so now you do as well, and while Obama has done the usual post-presidency things — kitesurfing, memoir-writing — he has also begun to build out a prolific television résumé thanks to a lucrative Netflix deal for Higher Ground, his production banner with Michelle Obama.

Not content, though, with being the Greg Berlanti of nonfiction programming, Obama tries his hand at being America’s Sir David Attenborough with Netflix’s new five-part series Our Great National Parks.

If Our Great National Parks has a thesis — and sometimes the series forgets that it has a thesis — it’s that plants, animals and humans are interconnected, and that the more space, land and sea we set aside for protection, the more we benefit. That really ought to be a completely noncontroversial idea, and yet it will be treated as controversial by people exclusively on one side of the political spectrum.

Of course, those same viewers will start freaking out as soon as Obama makes his first appearance in the introductory episode and won’t stop freaking out until Obama concludes the last episode with the observation, “Vote like the planet depends on it.” Except the chances of that hypothetical viewer watching five hours of this fairly innocuous documentary are close to zero.

For those wondering if Obama’s presence in Our Great National Parks is just token episodic book-ending, the answer is “No.” The former president is a fully committed and present figure here, making on-camera appearances at the top of each episode, providing full-throated narration throughout and even seemingly trolling the Fox News crowd with the selection of episodic locations, which include Hawaii, Kenya and Indonesia, each tied in some way to Obama’s biography.

Note that the first episode is almost annoyingly formless, a bunch of barely linked animal encounters from around the world. It feels like a padded preface or an endless teaser trailer. Subsequent episodes take a cleaner and far superior one-country-per-hour approach. From there, it’s fairly geographically representative, covering vast arid plains, humid rainforests, clear coastal waters and snowy highlands.

Unsurprisingly, Obama turns out to be a very fine narrator, and not just when Our Great National Parks has dogmatic points to make: He explains the synergistic ways in which governmentally reserved natural spaces can have non-antagonistic relationships with nearby human populations. He contributes wry humor to the scripts, with their slightly superficial, overly anthropomorphic explanations for animal behavior. And, more than that, his trademark deliberate cadences and oft-emulated calculated pauses are a perfect delivery mechanism for letting lovely nature photography breathe.

I can’t say that I learned a tremendous amount from Our Great National Parks — though I didn’t know that slow lorises were poisonous — but there’s a very relaxed dissemination of information here that’s genially informative if not rigorously intellectual. Given Obama’s lack of academic background in the subject matter, that’s probably completely appropriate.

Our Great National Parks doesn’t push too hard to be educational, and I think that reflects director Sarah Peat’s awareness that the series is entering a crowded marketplace. Peat has wide-ranging nature documentary experience, and however beautiful the photography is in Our Great National Parks, only at its very best is it able to compete with the sort of thing that PBS, BBC, Discovery and various other cable entities do regularly. It’s a genre with conventions and the innovations here feel limited — so much so that the narration doesn’t fail to mention any time a technological advancement is being made, like the nighttime photography of Chile’s adorable marsupial monito del monte or the sensitive night-vision cameras rendering colorful nocturnal imagery of Kenya’s black rhinos.

Just because Our Great National Parks isn’t always revelatory definitely doesn’t mean, though, that it isn’t generally attractive and occasionally breathtaking. Highlights include lemurs leaping through the jagged stone forest of Madagascar’s Tsingy de Bemaraha Reserve, a colorful Indonesian hammerhead worm devouring a glistening snail and the daunting flocks of thousands, possibly millions, of tiny red-billed quelea, swarms capable of nearly blocking the Kenya sun. The series has a tendency to over-rely on the cuteness of baby animals, using adorability as a narrative crutch at least a half-dozen times in each episode. But while there may be some jaded critics immune to the cuteness of a juvenile orangutan, I’m surely not.

Our Great National Parks ends with the aforementioned incitement to vote, which feels important but limited. There are so many different directions viewers enraptured by this glimpse at the world could be steered, and apart from that one explicit reminder, the series is light on calls to action or clearly presented audience resources. It’s a small thing, but it’s a thing future seasons could use for further differentiation. Though Barack Obama reading zoological bedtime stories will be more than enough for some people.