Spielberg presents nature doc ‘Life on Our Planet’

"Life on Our Planet," the new natural history series from Netflix and Steven Spielberg, sets out to tell the entire, dramatic story of life on Earth in a serialized, "binge watch" format.

Streaming globally today, the show's eight episodes transport viewers through Earth's five previous mass extinction events, each recreated with computer-generated visual effects.

As Morgan Freeman's narration reminds us, life has always found a way to endure every catastrophic event thrown at it over four billion years, from brutal ice ages to meteorites.

Each time, species that survive the destruction do battle for the next era's dominance in a "Game of Thrones"-style fight - only between vertebrates and invertebrates, or reptiles and mammals, instead of Starks and Lannisters.

"What we wanted to do, our intention at the very beginning, was to serialize the story of life. Make it a kind of binge watch. Because the story is so dramatic," said showrunner Dan Tapster.

"I think, and I hope, that is something that we've achieved, which is possibly a world-first in the natural history space."

Aside from a series of cliffhanger finales, "Life on Our Planet" finds dramatic tension with a series of ordinary, loveable underdogs who "win" evolution against the odds at least for a few hundred million years.

The influence of executive producer Spielberg's company, Amblin Television, encouraged a series with "a lot more emotion" and "pathos" than other natural history programs, said Tapster.

The show picks out key species, such as the first fish with a backbone, or the first vertebrate to migrate from ocean to land. With 99 percent of all the species that ever lived now extinct, filmmakers had no shortage to choose between.

"There...