"Planet Earth": There's no place like home

Every few minutes during the first two hours of Discovery Channel's “Planet Earth,” narrator Sigourney Weaver stops whatever she's doing to remind us what an unprecedented, spectacular, history-making program we're so privileged to watch.

There I was, on the couch, watching an exotic long-tailed spotted creature and her offspring eke out an existence along the rugged cliffs of the Himalayas. And I heard Weaver say, “These are the first intimate images of a snow leopard ever filmed in the wild.” I did not know that. A few minutes later, as Mama Leopard stalked some prey, Weaver piped up again. “A snow leopard hunt has never before been filmed,” she said.

  What kept this drumbeat of self-congratulatory observations from ruining my night was this: “Planet Earth,” an 11-hour indulgence beginning at 7 p.m. CT Sunday on Discovery, is that good.

  Is this the first time cameras have captured a wolf-on-caribou hunt from beginning to end? Has the mating dance of the bizarre rainforest bird of paradise never be caught on video before? Beats me. But I know this -- it's been years since I've paid this close attention to a nature program. “Planet Earth” is nothing less than an audacious attempt to redefine the form. And because it delivers such breathtaking pictures so often, I'm giving all of its braggadocio a pass.

Shot entirely in high definition, using cameras that have only been on the market a short time, “Planet Earth” is a round-and-round-the-world dazzlement for the eyes and ears. It's like the planet it's trying to capture in all its majesty and intricate beauty -- in a word, awesome.

  The first hour, “Pole to Pole,” traverses the globe from north to south, beginning with one of its many hard-won pieces of never-before footage. From a seemingly tiny indentation in an otherwise pristine snowcapped mountain, a furry white head emerges. And then, out of this impossibly small divot, out comes an adult female polar bear, followed by her two cubs.

  The footage, shot in the Norwegian Arctic in subhuman temperatures, was the result of a five-week stakeout by cameraman Doug Allan.

  “It's funny,” he told TV critics in January, “but by the end of five weeks I really felt I was right in touch with nature. I was kind of feeling the Arctic like a bear would feel it. You could tell the difference between minus 35 and minus 30, minus 30 being that little bit more comfortable although it's all relative. By the end I really felt like I had shared this, these intimate moments with this polar bear.”

  In hour two we meet the polar bear's Rocky Mountain equivalent, the mama grizzly, pawing away at a steep, forbidding mountainside that's nothing but rocks. It's another rare find, Weaver informs us: The bear is foraging for moths that live under the surface -- because, it happens, are high in fat.

  That kind of animal intelligence, acquired through a combination of patient lenscrafting and state-of-the-art equipment, is the perfect counterpart to the brilliant scenery captured throughout “Planet Earth.” Hour two, airing at 8 p.m., tours the world's mountaintops. Episode three, at 9 p.m., goes to the other extreme, to the deepest ocean bottoms, where, thanks to HD cameras that can capture video in near darkness, bring us such weird sea critters as the vampire squid that can evade predators by shining bright lights in their eyes.

  At the end of the first hour, we get a glimpse of how this large crew of BBC producers and camerafolks got so many remarkable images. Believe it or not, one of the most useful tools can be found on the four news choppers circling Kansas City: a stabilized lens capable of taking crisp pictures at a distance far enough to avoid being a nuisance.

  I must say, though, I was equally impressed at how one crew member was able to navigate his camera truck along a windy, dusty road in Africa's Ukavango Delta following an impala hunt -- all the while keeping a cigarette going in his left hand. Now that's skill.