The poster for Africa Earth’s Wild Home is a single eye: a great ape’s, half hidden behind leaves, with the outline of the African continent caught in its iris. It is a fair statement of intent for National Geographic’s new landmark nature docuseries, made by the BBC Studios Natural History Unit, premiering on the Nat Geo channel and streaming on Disney+ and Hulu. Wunmi Mosaku, the Oscar-nominated actor from Sinners, narrates it and serves as an executive producer. And the people who made it say the point was to look at the Africa that wildlife television has mostly walked past.

In the trailer, Mosaku’s narration makes the claim without hedging: “This is the definitive look at the wildest continent on our planet. There’s no place like Africa.” Definitive is a heavy word for a continent that has been filmed for nature television more than any other, and showrunner and series editor Gavin Boyland seems aware of the weight. “Africa got the best wildlife,” he told Variety. “It’s got the most spectacle. It’s got the charismatic animals. So, what we wanted to do from the outset is show people a different side of Africa.”

Beyond the lions: what the series says it filmed

The lions and elephants are in it; Boyland is clear that the crews filmed the familiar animals too. But almost every sequence National Geographic has chosen to talk about comes from the edges of the usual map. The announcement lists a black rain frog filmed for television for the first time, hyenas in the Congo hunting elephants at night, a rare wild black panther, the dark form of the African leopard, and chimpanzees using tools to fish for algae.

Variety’s preview adds a smaller and stranger list: the smallest crocodile hunting bats in pitch-black caves, a flying saucer beetle that digs trenches to harvest water from coastal fog, giant land tortoises, normally vegetarian, hunting birds, and a male fossa, the top predator of Madagascar, fighting for access to a female’s mating tree. Boyland has described the frog’s encounter as a chance to tell “a very relatable story about a creature that people haven’t really heard of before.”

The sequence he tells best started as a tip. A local guide in Senegal told the team about a pair of golden wolves, animals roughly the size of a coyote, that crossed to an island to hunt pelicans. When the crew got there, Boyland told Laughing Place, they found an island holding around 4,000 pelicans and wolves charging into them almost daily, going after birds about three times their size. He says it was the first crew to film in that park and the first to record the behavior. “Nature writes the script,” he said. “You never quite know what’s going to happen.”

A map drawn by local guides

How the series found those stories matters as much as the stories themselves. Instead of starting from the usual Western research networks, Boyland says, the team went to Africa and asked the wildlife guides, drivers, photographers and residents who see the animals every day. “Those people were able to point us towards new behaviors,” he told Variety.

The locations followed the tips: less-filmed corners of West Africa, the Sahara and remote islands. Boyland singles out a site in Chad, on the edge of the Sahara, where few film crews had worked, and says arriving there showed how dramatic and beautiful the setting was. “It’s got savannas, but there’s mountains, there’s lakes, the rivers, the islands,” he said of the continent as a whole.

That is where the series places its visual bet, at least on paper. Alongside conventional drones, the production used first-person-view racing drones, built to fly through a landscape rather than hover over it, with the aim of giving viewers the sense of traveling through a place. Computer-generated imagery covers what no camera can reach: the deep history and geological forces that shaped the continent’s deserts, forests, jungles, mountains and islands. The premise suggests a docuseries more interested in terrain than in the postcard horizon, in how a coastline, a cave or a fog bank decides what can live there.

Wunmi Mosaku and a franchise built one continent at a time

Mosaku is more than the voice here. The Academy Award nominee, known for Sinners, Loki and Lovecraft Country, executive produced the series as well as narrating it, so the voice guiding viewers belongs to someone who also shaped the project. Behind her, the credits run through the BBC’s natural history unit: Simon Blakeney is executive producer for BBC Studios NHU, Pam Caragol for National Geographic.

Africa Earth’s Wild Home is also the first chapter of something larger. National Geographic describes it as the opening season of a multiyear franchise that will document the planet continent by continent, a joint project with the National Geographic Society’s network of Explorers and with Rolex’s Perpetual Planet Initiative, which presents the series. Variety reports the production employed more than 50 people over nearly four years of filming across nearly 30 countries. The BBC’s Seven Worlds, One Planet gave each continent a single episode; this format gives one continent a full season.

Each episode closes with an Explorer Spotlight on the scientists and photographers behind the discoveries, among them Ugandan wildlife veterinarian Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka and Steve Boyes, who leads National Geographic’s Okavango Wilderness Project, alongside fellow Rolex National Geographic Perpetual Planet Explorers Matt Shirley and Ingi Agnarsson. The finale turns from animals to people: rising African conservation leaders, community-led projects and local researchers. Boyland describes it as an emotional episode that highlights a new wave of Indigenous conservation in Africa.

That ending points at the question a continent-by-continent franchise cannot avoid. National Geographic’s own pitch is that the planet is changing faster than ever, and the series is built on things filmed for the first time: wolves on a pelican island, a frog no television camera had caught, crocodiles in caves. A first record is also a baseline. Whether filming those places can do anything to keep them as they are is not something seven episodes of television can settle.

When and where to watch Africa Earth’s Wild Home

In the United States, the series premieres on Friday, October 2 at 8 p.m. ET on the National Geographic channel, and all seven episodes stream from Saturday, October 3 on Disney+ and Hulu. In the UK, National Geographic airs it from October 3, with all seven episodes on Disney+ the same day. In other markets the series arrives through the local Disney+ catalog, and timing can vary by country.

Africa Earth’s Wild Home: quick answers

Who narrates Africa Earth’s Wild Home? Wunmi Mosaku, who is also an executive producer. It is not a David Attenborough series.

How many episodes are there? Seven, all available to stream at once on Disney+.

Is it a BBC or a National Geographic series? Both, in a sense: it was produced by the BBC Studios Natural History Unit for National Geographic.

Where can I watch it? On Disney+ worldwide where available, on Hulu in the US, and on the National Geographic channel.

Will there be more continents? Yes. National Geographic presents Africa as the first season of a multiyear franchise covering the planet one continent at a time; its announcement does not say which continent comes next.

Tags: Disney, National Geographic, Africa Earth's Wild Home, BBC Studios Natural History Unit, Gavin Boyland, nature documentary