Mostly, the dinosaurs seem to float above their live-action backdrops: less real animals of flesh and heft, than sad digital ghosts hauled back to environments they vanished from 66 million years ago. The rub lies in the rest of the show.įor a production backed by the financial might of Apple, the computer-generated imagery is weightless and penny-pinching.

Except in Prehistoric Planet’s case we’re treated to a brief digression into, say, how the biomechanics of a Mosasaur allowed it to become the fastest marine predator which ever lived, hitting its prey with the force of an articulated lorry. The ones where a short, jolly look at the life of a cameraman spirals into a grim Conradian parable about why exactly you shouldn’t spend six months penguin-fancying in the hellish darkness of an Antarctic winter. They reminded me of those “making of” featurettes in other nature shows. Yet the trouble with the second season of Apple TV+’s Cretaceous doc is that these segments are the best bit. Perhaps that explains why Prehistoric Planet decided to sex things up by relegating the actual experts to the last five minutes of each episode, instead filling airtime with lots of CGI footage of dinosaurs flying, waddling and chomping. Palaeontologists are not, on the whole, a dazzlingly photogenic bunch.

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