Latest Documentaries

The Alpinist

Marc-André Leclerc climbs alone, far from the limelight. The free-spirited 23-year-old makes some of the boldest solo ascents in history. With no cameras and no margin for error, Leclerc's approach is the essence of solo adventure.

2021 • People

Into the Extreme

We turn the camera on the extraordinary people who are dedicating their lives to helping the animals cope with today's extreme weather.

S1E6Force of Nature • 2026 • Nature

Boiling Point

New extremes of heat and drought are pushing the extraordinary behavioural and physical adaptations of wombats, leopards and kangaroo rats to their very limits.

S1E5Force of Nature • 2026 • Nature

Melting Worlds

Andrew Lincoln narrates a look at how animals adapted to the cold are struggling in a warming world. A snow leopard in the peaks of the Indian Himalayas is forced from his home by a rival male, while an Arctic ground squirrel in Alaska undertakes the coldest migration of any mammal, and a young Arctic fox in Svalbard must face her first winter alone.

S1E4Force of Nature • 2026 • Nature

Savage Seas

The world's coastal regions have always been an extreme environment to raise a family, but warming seas are exacerbating the challenges of parenthood. A hurricane hits a flamingo colony while chicks are still on the nest, a sea otter faces a huge winter storm in California, a clownfish on the Great Barrier Reef sees its anemone home bleached, and a little anole lizard clings on during a hurricane.

S1E3Force of Nature • 2026 • Nature

Rising Waters

As the planet's shifting rain patterns rewrite the rules, survival is no longer about strength alone. From the desert to the jungle, three mothers face the ultimate test of survival as monsoon floodwaters tear through pygmy elephant territory in Borneo, a female platypus in Australia watches a flash flood destroy her home river, and a flood in Africa brings prey to a lone lioness. Andrew Lincoln narrates.

S1E2Force of Nature • 2026 • Nature

Extreme Earth

An owl protects its chicks underground, cheetahs struggle through record floods in Kenya, and a polar bear searches for disappearing Arctic sea ice as extreme weather intensifies across the planet.

S1E1Force of Nature • 2026 • Nature

The Fall

As internal crises, economic strain, and repeated barbarian invasions intensify, the Western Empire fractures and collapses in 476, while the Eastern Empire survives and evolves into the Byzantine state centered on Constantinople.

S1E2The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire • 2026 • History

The Rise

From a small Italian city-state to Mediterranean superpower, this episode traces Rome’s expansion, the transition from Republic to Empire under Augustus, and the stability and prosperity of the Pax Romana that cemented imperial dominance.

S1E1The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire • 2026 • History

The Horse

In the salt marshes of the Camargue, Chris explores the evolutionary beginnings of animal movement and how it reached its peak in one of the most elegant and athletic animals on Earth: the horse.

Evolution • 2026 • Nature

The Dolphin

In the Bahamas, Chris dives into one of the biggest questions in nature - how intelligence itself evolved, and how it arose in the dolphin's mind. Inside each is the result of a three-billion-year journey.

S1E4Evolution • 2026 • Nature

The Bat

In Borneo, Chris sets out to answer a deceptively simple question: how the drive to find food shaped life on Earth, and gave rise to one of nature’s most insatiable feeders. This feeding frenzy has origins from half a billion years ago.

S1E3Evolution • 2026 • Nature

Recommended Documentaries

The High Seas

Venture into the deep, dark and desolate oceans that are home to an abundance of beautiful -- and downright strange -- creatures.

S1E6Our Planet • 2019 • Nature

Mountains - Life in Thin Air

Film which explores the extraordinary ways in which people survive at extreme altitudes.

S1E5Human PlanetEnvironment

Home Workouts

The home fitness revolution has exploded into a multibillion-dollar industry. Are home workouts a healthy habit - or just hype?

S2E8History 101 • 2022 • Health

Seeing in Colour

Using the latest camera technology, David Attenborough reveals the extraordinary ways in which animals use colour: to win a mate, to fight off rivals and to warn enemies.

S1E1Attenborough's Life in Colour • 2021 • Nature

Human

Today Earth is a human world, home to eight billion people and counting. Humans now have a greater effect in shaping Earth’s surface than many natural processes. In this episode, Chris Packham explores how dramatic twists in Earth’s story enabled humans to go from being part of nature to controlling it, and what we can learn from this epic tale before it’s too late. The story begins 66 million years ago with the catastrophic impact of the asteroid that wiped out the (Non-avian) dinosaurs. From the ashes of the desolation that followed, a new animal family rose to power. This was adaptable and inventive enough to emerge out of the harsh new world – the mammals. It began with a distant ancestor that shared many traits of the much maligned, but evolutionarily brilliant, rat. Due to a series of extreme geological and climatic events, mammals evolved into early primates feasting in the newly formed tropical rainforests, and then to early humans travelling vast distances between forests in places like East Africa’s Rift Valley. Earth’s story is a saga spanning 4.5 billion years, but it’s only in the last 11,000 years - with the rise of farming - that our species has started to dramatically impact our planet and its ecosystems. The human chapter of Earth’s story might end in disaster, but Chris is keen to argue for a different ending, where all of humanity’s achievements to date “…were just our dress rehearsals, because in the very near future our species will need to reach the zenith of its achievements and… all humanity will have to learn to put our Earth first.”

S1E5Earth: One Planet, Many Lives • 2023 • Nature

Europe Ignites 1561- 1569

In France, perfidy and treason plunge the French Kingdom into chaos. Behind new king Charles IX, Catherine de Medici rules in the background as master of the throne. However, she is unable to prevent a civil war.

S2E3The Real War of Thrones: The True History of Europe • 2018 • History

Brain Documentaries

Mindfulness

Take a deep, cleansing breath and slowly exhale while being enlightened on the impact meditation can have on your mind and body.

S1E4The Mind, Explained • 2019 • Brain

The Cognitive Tradeoff Hypothesis

Humans are the only Earthlings with complex language. But at what cost was that ability acquired? In this episode, I visit Tetsuro Matsuzawa to learn about his influential cognitive tradeoff hypothesis.

S3E1Mind Field • 2019 • Brain

The Psychedelic Drug Trial

The Psychedelic Drug Trial has exclusive access to a ground-breaking new trial at Imperial College London. The trial sees, for the first time ever under controlled conditions, a psychedelic drug tested head-to-head against a standard antidepressant as a treatment for depression. The film follows a pioneering team of scientists and psychotherapists, led by Professor David Nutt, Dr Robin Carhart-Harris and Dr Rosalind Watts, as they compare the effects of psilocybin (the active ingredient of magic mushrooms) with an antidepressant (an SSRI called escitalopram) on a small group of participants with clinical depression. This is scientific research at its most cutting edge. With over seven million people being prescribed antidepressants each year in England alone, this drug trial is an important milestone in understanding a completely different treatment for depression.

2021 • Brain

Crimes Against Humanity

International criminal lawyer Patricia Viseur Sellers investigates the role of perpetrators, from leaders to followers, as well as those who resist the power of hate.

S1E5Why We Hate • 2019 • Brain

The Stilwell Brain

There are 100 billion individual neurons in the human brain. Working together, they allow us to make sense of, and move through, the world around us. Scientists have built replicas of the human brain with computers, but no one has ever successfully made a brain out of humans. On this episode, I’ll travel back to my hometown of Stilwell, Kansas, and turn it into a working brain!

S3E3Mind Field • 2018 • Brain

Out of Control?

We all like to think we are in control of our lives - of what we feel and what we think. But scientists are now discovering this is often simply an illusion. Surprising experiments are revealing that what you think you do and what you actually do can be very different. Your unconscious mind is often calling the shots, influencing the decisions you make, from what you eat to who you fall in love with. If you think you are really in control of your life, you may have to think again.

Brain

Astronomy Documentaries

Janus

Ants, scorpions and fireflies provide clues for biologists to conjecture about life on exoplanet Janus, including highly adaptable pentapods.

S1E2Alien Worlds • 2020 • Astronomy

Stardust

Brian Cox discusses the elements of which all living things, including humans, are made. He explores the beginnings of the universe and the origins of humanity, going far back in time to look at the process of stellar evolution.

S1E2Wonders of the UniverseAstronomy

Asteroids, Comets and Meteors

How do these objects differ from one another, if at all? Nick Moskovitz, an astronomer at the Lowell Observatory, compares these space solar system bodies.

2015 • Astronomy

Did a Black Hole Built the Milky Way?

To discover what created the Milky Way, scientists have to look back 13.7 billion years to the moments just after the Big Bang.

S3E7How the Universe Works • 2014 • Astronomy

Secrets of Time Travel

A look at the concepts behind changing the way we travel through the space-time continuum, and how extreme speed and extreme gravity can change the rules of the game.

S8E5How the Universe Works • 2020 • Astronomy

How Much Of The Universe Can Humanity Ever See?

There’s an absolute limit to our access to the universe beyond our own galaxy. There’s a limit to what we can ever hope to explore or send signals to, and a very different limit to what we can ever hope to witness. Today we’re going to explore the latter. We’re going to figure out the absolute limit of our future view of the universe, and of the universe’s ability to influence us. Next time we’ll turn it around and ask: how much of the external universe can WE potentially influence, and even explore?

PBS Space Time • 2023 • Astronomy

Random! Documentaries

Boredom

Believe it or not this is the first serious documentary on boredom. Director Albert Nerenberg (LAUGHOLOGY, STUPIDITY) asks why the subject of boredom has been so religiously avoided and shows that boredom isn't what you think it is.

2012 • Brain

Mysuru to Chennai

Michael Portillo's Bradshaw's 1913 Handbook of Indian, Foreign and Colonial Travel leads him on railway journey through the modern south Indian states of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, from the former princely state of Mysore to the first stronghold of the East India Company in Chennai, formerly Madras. At sunset Michael joins selfie-stick wielding crowds back at the palace as they wait to capture it being illuminated by thousands of bulbs. An early morning yoga class is the perfect way to stretch out before boarding a train to Bengalaru. After a sticky encounter with a mango, he meets the entrepreneurs whose innovations are driving India's hi-tech boom with inventions from mobile heart scanners to cooking apps.

S1E3Great Indian Railway Journeys • 2018 • Travel

The true story of Santa Claus

Santa Claus is a global icon. But where did this friendly old man in a red suit who brings gifts for children actually come from? How could Santa become a central figure of our consumer society?

2021 • People

Rise of Animals: Triumph of the Vertebrates

David Attenborough embarks on a sweeping 500-million-year odyssey tracing the rise of vertebrates—from primitive fish to dominant mammals—using stunning fossil discoveries and CGI to reveal how evolutionary innovations shaped us.

2013 • Nature

The Rise and Fall of El Chapo

Killer, drug smuggler, folk hero, Houdini of jailhouse escapes--the legend of Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman is well known. But now this two-hour documentary special reveals an unprecedented look at the man behind the myth and how his international drug cartel impacts us right here at home.

2016 • People

Mars Hunt for Alien Life

The Viking missions to Mars may offer proof that life once existed there.

S1E1Mysteries of our Universe: Our Solar System • 2019 • Astronomy