[Tom Hanks] manages to take what are pretty standard nature documentary scenes, like baby animals being unsure about leaving the nest or predators stalking their prey, and gives them a simi[l]ar air of importance that the best known narrator in this genre, Sir David Attenborough, gives the docs he works on. If there is anything innovative about The Americas is that it makes things that were previously unseen into interesting drama.

The Americas bounces around these competing storylines too quickly. I wanted to spend more time getting to know each animal and habitat to understand them, but The Americas didn't linger.

Choosing Hanks as narrator positions it in a cosy corner, and he delivers on that. It would be churlish not to be awed by the footage, which is amazing in the truest sense of the word. .... But it is becoming less and less easy to sit back and enjoy the show when that show is wearing blinkers and sticking its fingers in its ears. Even if it is humming a pretty tune.

The Americas is as safe and conventionalized a portrait of our wild world as you could ever hope to see, accompanied by the safe and conventionalized musings of pervasive narrator Tom Hanks.

The result is an objectively beautiful series filled with awe-inspiring landscapes and handsomely depicted wildlife whose existence is flattened by a repetitive approach.