Critical and Commercial Reception
The series was a major international success: it was sold to 100 territories and watched by an estimated audience of 500 million people worldwide. However, Life on Earth did not generate the same revenue for the BBC as later Attenborough series because the Corporation signed away the American and European rights to their co-production partners, Warner Bros. and Reiner Moritz.
It was nominated for four BAFTA TV awards and won the Broadcasting Press Guild Award for Best Documentary Series. In a list of the 100 Greatest British Television Programmes drawn up by the British Film Institute in 2000, voted for by industry professionals, Life on Earth was placed 32nd.
Read more about this topic: Life On Earth (TV series)
Famous quotes containing the words critical and, critical, commercial and/or reception:
“Probably more than youngsters at any age, early adolescents expect the adults they care about to demonstrate the virtues they want demonstrated. They also tend to expect adults they admire to be absolutely perfect. When adults disappoint them, they can be critical and intolerant.”
—The Lions Clubs International and the Quest Nation. The Surprising Years, I, ch.4 (1985)
“It would be easy ... to regard the whole of world 3 as timeless, as Plato suggested of his world of Forms or Ideas.... I propose a different viewone which, I have found, is surprisingly fruitful. I regard world 3 as being essentially the product of the human mind.... More precisely, I regard the world 3 of problems, theories, and critical arguments as one of the results of the evolution of human language, and as acting back on this evolution.”
—Karl Popper (19021994)
“So by all means lets have a television show quick and long, even if the commercial has to be delivered by a man in a white coat with a stethoscope hanging around his neck, selling ergot pills. After all the public is entitled to what it wants, isnt it? The Romans knew that and even they lasted four hundred years after they started to putrefy.”
—Raymond Chandler (18881959)
“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybodys face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.”
—Jonathan Swift (16671745)