It's biggest failure is that it stuck the the outdated and idiotic 2000's palaeo-documentary trope of elevating and denigrating certain taxa and lineages by trying to tell this grand evolutionary narrative about natural history's "winners vs. losers", especially such narratives have long since been proven outdated when Life On Our Planet came out, so they don't even have the excuse the Trilogy of Life had of these ideas only being proven dated later on.

The good: The Arthropleura and curious Smilodon scenes were really well done. The gorgonopsid is one of, if not the best to ever appear in a documentary. The bad: Format being all over the place The design team's priority was making the creatures scary (which ended up being pointless in the terror bird's case) Depicting clades as warring factions. What the hell happened to the Allosaurus? Its proportions are awful, the Battle at Big Rock Allosaurus looks dozens of times more accurate Incorrect environments (such as plants that hadn't appeared yet being present in the Paleozoic) due to fiming in real locations. This could have been forgivable, but the fact that they decided to use CGI generated environments in some other segments takes that chance of an excuse away. Probably the most insulting part: They claimed that Lystrosaurus couldn't register what a predator was, saying that it got eaten to extinction due to its stupidity (while also misrepresenting Erythrosuchus in the process)

Morgan Freeman's voice wasn't able to save the show.

They marketed the documentary as a dinosaur documentary, even though the share of dinosaurs in the documentary was only small and included only a few species. They gave the audience a false promise and people were disappointed when the documentary didn't live up to the hype and high expectations. For example, many expected, because of the image created by marketing, that it would have been similar to Prehistoric Planet.

not to mention that the episode, the anticipated 'big' episode that we imagined would be primarily focused on the Dinosaurs, the biggest (in more ways than one) stars of the show, instead seemed to mainly focus on insects and small mammals, while there were only 3 or 4 (usually short) basic scenes actually starring Dinosaurs. Quite the let down to me, though to be frank, after that insulting 'Smilodon superior; Terror Bird inferior' scene, my hopes hadn't risen back to what they once were by then

Judging by the snout of the Pliosaur my guess it’s Pliosaurus funkei but I agree they should’ve specified it instead of just saying “it’s a plesiosaur “

It felt depressing rather than enjoyable and educational. The constant social Darwinism and minimal screen time of the creatures ruined it.

It had a good idea , don't get me wrong. The modern animal segments were fine , but if I wanted to watch it then I'd watch Planet Earth or a BBC animal documentary. Hopefully the second season improves.

Agree with basically everything you’ve said! The show had a couple strong points, namely the Arthropleura scene, but was overall a major disappointment.

From the title of this video I thought this was going to be a nihilistic video about how it’s already hopeless and life on our planet has failed and here is why (Anthropocene) 😂🤣 All great points! Thank you!

as we all should know, most things made by netflix are pretty bad, at least from what i have heard

Why would they false advertise?

literally me when

It was actually a great documentary my problems are their wasn’t a lot of extinct species and they didn’t have a segment of earth after man

oh wow i just finished this documentary and had the EXACT same problems lol

One of the easiest ways to improve this series would have been to reduce its runtime to just 6 episodes by moving much of the live action footage to one of Netflix and Silverback picture's standard nature programs like Our Planet II. That would have been easy and would have cost nothing. Why they felt the need to make this 8 episodes when they clearly didn't have enough paleo content for such a runtime is baffling. The editing of this series is a mess making it hard to keep track of where we are in the timeline with its constant jumps. So many easily avoidable mistakes kept this series from being what it should have been. Overall the series was alright and had a few standout moments but I was still disappointed with it. A second season has been confirmed containing only 4 episodes and primarily focusing on the dinosaurs. I hope it learns from the mistakes of the first season and has a more tight narrative

Life on our Planet is a worthless nothing.