Life On Our Planet is a fascinating look at how life evolved on Earth, with stunning visual effects that show how long-extinct species might have lived.

Diving into this eight-part series and its seven-plus hours is a bit like signing on to a semester-long symposium on evolution, biodiversity, the history of mass extinctions and the resilience of the organism. This is not to say it isn't thoroughly fascinating, just serious.

Too much in Life on Our Planet is repetitive and laboured, with clear attempts to pep things up.

The main draw is dinosaurs but they barely appear until mid-series. Too much screentime is spent on slo-mo recreations of meteorological events which, let’s face it, aren’t as thrilling as T-rexes fighting triceratops. When we do get some action, squeamish cameras cut away before any bloodshed.

Epochal events are hard to capture in images, so it’s trying to make us feel the hugeness of what’s happening with words. But if the series was less concerned with constantly reinforcing how incredible everything is, it could have found room to be more informative.