OCEANS MAKE UP 70 PERCENT OF THE EARTH, 100 PERCENT OF AMC NETWORKS WILL CARRY THE PREMIERE OF THE WORLDWIDE PHENOMENON PLANET EARTH: BLUE PLANET II NEXT MONTH BBC AMERICA Series Will Launch With A Five-Network Premiere Event On Saturday, January 20 at 9/8c
New Official US Exclusive Trailer Released Today – watch here
Planet Earth: Blue Planet II, the next installment of BBCA’s Emmy Award-winning Planet Earth, will premiere on Saturday, January 20, 9/8c, as an AMC Networks simulcast event across BBC AMERICA, AMC, IFC, WE tv and SundanceTV. Subsequent episodes will appear Saturday nights on BBC AMERICA. The new series*, presented by Sir David Attenborough, scored by Academy Award-winner Hans Zimmer and produced by James Honeyborne has already become a major television event around the world. The series will premiere day-and-date in Canada on the BBC Earth Channel.
Planet Earth: Blue Planet II takes viewers on a revelatory and magical journey into the mesmerizing world of our oceans – the most undiscovered place on our planet. Our oceans are by turn tempestuous and serene, exquisitely beautiful and bleakly forbidding. They cover 70% of the Earth’s surface and hold 97% of all the water in the world. There is more life in the deep sea than anywhere else on Earth. It is said we know more about the surface of Mars than the depths of our own planet. Our final frontier is the deep ocean – Earth’s ‘inner space’.
Ed Carroll, Chief Operating Officer of AMC Networks, said: “Planet Earth: Blue Planet II is rare, event television, an extraordinary series we are so proud to launch as a premiere simulcast across all five of our national networks. AMC Networks prides itself on being a premiere destination for extraordinary storytelling in all of its forms, and this remarkable exploration of our natural world from the BBC is storytelling at its finest.”
Sarah Barnett, President of BBC AMERICA, said: “This next chapter in BBC AMERICA’s nature programming franchise is more incredible than anything yet seen, complete with heart-pounding exploration and incredible cinematography. The experience is a magical and transcendent trip into unexplored worlds.”
In the UK, the series is the highest rated show of the year and the most watched natural history title in more than 15 years with an excess of 14 million people tuning in for the premiere episode. Already a staggering hit in China, all Planet Earth: Blue Planet II content, including short form, trailers and the first two episodes, was watched over 100 million times in its first 13 days. The series premiere also trended globally on Twitter.
By using breakthroughs in science and cutting-edge technology to explore this final frontier, the series reveals the astonishing characters, otherworldly places and extraordinary new animal behaviors. Warm and compelling stories about marine habitats and their characterful inhabitants will build people’s emotional relationship with our oceans and bring a new perspective to this little-known world.
Over four years in production, the Planet Earth: Blue Planet II teams mounted 125 expeditions, visited 39 countries, and filmed on every continent and across every ocean. They spent over 6,000 hours diving underwater, filming everywhere from familiar shores to the deepest seas. From the Gulf of Mexico to the Seychelles and from South Africa to Norway the team filmed several ‘firsts’ including:
Producer Orla Doherty and her team were the first humans to dive 3,280 feet into the frigid waters of the Antarctic, in a deep manned submersible, to explore under icebergs the size of a city block and discover creatures so alien they could come from outer space.
At 2,000 feet deep in the Gulf of Mexico, they filmed methane volcanoes erupting with bubbles the size of basketballs.
Life was thought to be impossible in the deepest point of the Earth’s ocean, seven miles down, but they filmed creatures living under a pressure equivalent to 50 jumbo jets stacked on top of one another.
Species such as leaping blennies – fish that live almost exclusively on land; Giant trevally that fly out of the water to snatch seabirds in mid-air; the ingenious coral grouper, a fish that enlists the help of an octopus to hunt little fish hiding among coral and, perhaps most charming of all, the industrious tuskfish, who uses a coral anvil to crack open his clams.
Planet Earth: Blue Planet II will be presented by Sir David Attenborough and is made by BBC Studios’ Natural History Unit, co-produced with BBC AMERICA, Tencent, WDR, France Télévisions and CCTV9 in partnership with The Open University. It is Executive Produced by James Honeyborne and Series Produced by Mark Brownlow, and was commissioned by Charlotte Moore, Director of BBC Content and Tom McDonald, Head of Commissioning, Natural History and Specialist Factual. The score was composed by Hans Zimmer, Jacob Shea and David Fleming for Bleeding Fingers Music.
Notes to editors:
Planet Earth: Blue Planet II is a seven-part series plus an eighth ‘making-of’ episode.
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About AMC Networks
Dedicated to producing quality programming and movie content for more than 30 years, AMC Networks Inc. (NASDAQ: AMCX) owns and operates several of the most popular and award-winning brands in cable television. AMC, IFC, SundanceTV, WE tv, and IFC Films produce and deliver distinctive, compelling and culturally relevant content that engages audiences across multiple platforms. The company also operates BBC AMERICA through a joint venture with BBC Worldwide. In addition, the company operates AMC Networks International, its global division.
About BBC AMERICA
BBC AMERICA is a hub of innovative, culturally contagious programming including the Emmy®-winning Planet Earth II, top-rated science-fiction phenomenon Doctor Who, fan-favorite Orphan Black, ground-breaking unscripted series Top Gear, buzzy and wildly bizarre Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency starring Elijah Wood, as well as the upcoming series Killing Eve from Phoebe Waller-Bridge, and Planet Earth: Blue Planet II, the next chapter in the epic story of our planet. A joint venture between BBC Worldwide (the commercial arm of the BBC) and AMC Networks, BBCA’s influential shows have attracted critical acclaim and earned Emmy® Awards, Peabody Awards, Critics’ Choice Awards and Golden Globes®. Created in 1998, the irrepressible network has garnered one of cable’s most curious, educated and affluent audiences, with many properties boasting super-fan levels of engagement. Available through cable, satellite TV and streaming services, BBC AMERICA broadcasts in both standard and high-definition. Get caught up, BBCA offers full episodes On Demand across all major digital platforms, BBC AMERICA app and bbcamerica.com.
