Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Earth At Night In Color’ On Apple TV+, A Nature Series That Uses High-Tech Cameras To Light Up The Night

The idea behind Earth At Night In Color is that filmmakers, armed with state-of-the-art light-sensitive cameras that light up the nighttime so it almost looks like daytime, show what goes on overnight in habitats around the planet. To this point, what we know about these habitats, including the behavior of the animals in them, has been limited by the fact that the human eye can’t make out colors in the dark, and neither could film equipment — until now.

EARTH AT NIGHT IN COLOR: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: “The night. A shadowy world that hides over half the animals on our planet,” intones Tom Hiddleston as we see nighttime nature scenes.

The Gist: The first episode, shot at a nature preserve in Kenya, shows what this equipment is capable of. Even though we see the stars and the moon in the sky, the sky itself is as blue as it is during the day. We find out that lions, nocturnal by nature, become very social beings at night. It’s also a time when a lioness potentially might leave her cubs behind to go hunt for food. In the episode, a lioness brings down a wildebeest, giving sustenance to her entire pride. But when she comes back to her cubs, two of the three are missing. The lioness, her remaining cub in tow, searches for her other cubs every night for four nights, and we see how desperate — but determined — she is despite long odds.

We also see hyenas stalking the pride’s kill, and an eagle owl scooping up spiders, because under a full moon it’s too bright out for him to stalk his usual rodent and reptile prey.

Other episodes of the series, where Alex Williamson is the executive producer, will follow tarisers, jaguars, bears and cheetahs. It will also have an episode that shows animals operating overnight in Los Angeles, Chicago and Toronto (expect a lot of pigeons and rats).

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Because of the technology used, Earth At Night In Color is unlike any nature show we’ve ever seen.

Our Take: When you get down to brass tacks, the very practically-titled Earth At Night In Color operates like any other nature special we’ve seen on Netflix, the BBC, or even on Apple TV+: Animals followed in their natural habitat, with footage stitched together into a story. But the low-light capabilities of the cameras the filmmakers used made the episode we watched fascinating, for a couple of reasons.

First of all, it’s not like we’re watching these animals in the dim blue-and-black vision humans have at night, or the photo-negative shots that are typically seen with night-vision cameras and lenses. We’re seeing these scenes play out as if they’re in daytime. We’re not 100 percent sure there wasn’t some post-production CGI involved with making the sky look brighter and bluer than it really was, but there’s no faking the colors we see. There came a point that we had to be reminded that this was all at night by shots of the stars in the blue skies above a scene.

So we’re seeing behaviors that nature documentarians have not been able to capture with such clarity before. But the other thing that the technology helps illustrate to us is that this is how these animals see things at night, or at least an approximation of it. To a lion, it’s not pitch black at night, because their night vision is very sensitive. For all we know, the blue skies we see on the show are how they see the night all the time. Giving that kind of insight is fascinating, as is all the activity the animals engage in during a time when humans are generally asleep.

What Age Group Is This For?: The show is TV-PG, likely because there’s a fair amount of “circle of life”-style violence, with predators killing and eating their prey. But if your young’un is OK with that, we think this would be fascinating for nature-loving kids 6 and up.

Parting Shot: A “making of” short at the end shows the filmmakers for the lion episode trying to find the lioness’ lost cubs. Then they discuss how few lions are left on the planet — in the tens of thousands — and how precious each life is.

Sleeper Star: For some reason, we took great comfort in watching the eagle owl devour spiders. Not sure why.

Most Pilot-y Line: Nothing we could see.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Earth At Night In Color gives a fascinating look at nature in a way the human eye has never seen before, and that alone is reason to watch.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.

Stream Earth At Night In Color On Apple TV+