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Wonderfully irreverent underdogs are not the nature docs of your parents

    An Emerald Jewel Wasp comes from a cockroach.

    An Emerald Jewel Wasp comes from a cockroach.

    National Geographic/Simon de Glanville

    A pack of African hunting dogs attacks a honey dash.

    A pack of African hunting dogs is not a party for the thick skin of the honey dass.

    National Geographic/Tom Walker

    “There is a feeling after a while when you play the same animals for the same people, and the shows start to look the same and that also applies to your audience,” Linfield told Ars. “We thought, okay, how can we do something absolutely the opposite? We have gone through our career with collecting stories from these weird and crazy creatures that do not end up in the script because they are not big or sexy and they live under a rock. But they often have the best life history and the craziest super powers.”

    A good example: to see the velvet worm in the episode “Superheroes”, which crawls on the unsuspecting prey before they spray mucus over their food. (It is also a handy defense mechanism against predators such as the Wolf Spider.)

    As soon as Linfield and Berlowitz decided to concentrate on the underdogs of nature and to follow a more humorous approach, Ryan Reynolds became their top choice for a narrator-rich Attenborough. As lucky, the couple shared an agent with the mega star. So although they thought that Reynolds would not agree with the project, they put together a Sizzle reel, complete with a “fake Canadian Ryan Reynolds Sound-Alike” who told the story. Reynolds was on the set when he received the reel and liked it so much that he repoded and sent back his own story for the images.

    “From that moment he was inside,” said Linfield, and Wildstar films worked closely with Reynolds and his company to develop the latest series. “We have never worked for a series before, a joint collaboration from the first day,” Berlowitz admitted. But it worked: the end result finds the perfect balance between scientific revelation and accurate natural history and an edgy comic tone.

    That tone is typical Reynolds, and although he mainly followed the script (which helped his team write), Linfield and Berlowitz admit that there was also a considerable amount of improvisation everything PG-13. “What we had not appreciated is that he is an incredible improvisation artist,” said Berlowitz. “He can't help himself. He touches character and starts to reeftrue [the footage]. There are some takes that we certainly could not use, which might fit a slightly more Hulu audience. “Some AD-Libs, however, came in the last episodes, such as Reynolds who described an Aye-Aye as” as fear and panic had a baby and rolled it in dog hair “-although to get it back a little and to do it again.