Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Secrets of the Whales’ on Disney+, a Nature-Doc Series That Promises to Dish on the Big Mammals

Secrets of the Whales is swimming around the Nat Geo pool of Disney+, four episodes of cetacean love released in celebration of Earth Day. The series, produced by James Cameron and narrated by Sigourney Weaver, is part of Disney’s tradition of releasing nature documentaries — about cute monkeys, cute elephants, cute big cats, cute penguins and other cute things — to mark the holiday. So will this four-parter convince us that whales are actually cute? (Note: Yes, they’re cute, and if you’re not convinced by now, you may not be able to be convinced.) Will it tell us something we didn’t already know about whales? Or will it just be the same old stuff?

SECRETS OF THE WHALES: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A gorgeous scene: Orca dorsal fins break the surface of a Norwegian fjord beneath a sunset’s orange skies.

The Gist: Sigourney (may I call her Sigourney?) makes some bold claims: Whales are just like us; they love, deeply; they play, with joy; they have culture. This series will back all that up, right? We’ll see. Anyway, this debut episode, “Orca Dynasty,” focuses on the beast known informally as the killer whale, the unfortunate Sea World mascot. We only see it in its natural environs, thankfully, where it’s never been known to attack a human, unlike in its little tourist-trap aquariums. See, I’ve watched Blackfish, I know how this works.

But I didn’t know quite how orcas work in the wild. Not even NatGeo photographer extraordinaire Brian Skerry, who’s shot whales for many years, expected to witness such polite behavior from a pod of New Zealand orcas. One of the localized tricks these orcas know — that orcas elsewhere in the world don’t utilize — is to snatch stingrays in their mouths and flip them upside down, which puts them to sleep. They snatch and eat a bunch of rays every day. Brian was chilling with his camera near the ocean floor during orca lunch one day when one of the whales dropped a half-eaten ray right in front of him as if to say, JOIN US! When he didn’t partake, the whale returns to grab it and pauses to look at him like, hey, more for me, your loss buddy. It’s kind of a jaw-dropper. Question: Is tipping the waitstaff part of orca culture?

The episode shows orcas in other places on the globe using behaviors specific to their pods. In Norway, they shepherd herring into dense, massive schools then slap them with their tails, stunning them and making them easy to gulp down. In Antarctica, the teenage females in a large pod babysit the calves while the adults are away (just like us!). In Patagonia, a “famous pod” of orcas — what, do they have their own private photographer or something? — is led by a 40-something grandmother intently skilled at snatching seals right off the beach. All these orcas must teach these behaviors to the next generation, because their survival depends on it.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The BBC’s two Blue Planet series had whale stuff in them, right? Otherwise, the doc films Blackfish and Oceans (Disney’s 2009 Earth Day release) feature similarly extraordinary and educational whale behavior.

Our Take: At this point, nature docs need to offer us high-def widescreen eye-gogglingly exceptional footage and avoid the same old tropes in order to maintain our attention. As a moderate consumer of such content, I’ve seen the herring-whackers and the seal-snatchers before, albeit not quite in this context — that these learned behaviors are passed down through generations and are localized to specific groups of orcas is exactly what Secrets of the Whales needs to give us to justify its existence.

“Orca Dynasty’ goes beyond that, thanks to Kerry’s extraordinary interaction with the stingray-snacker. That’s your money shot; that’s what sets the series apart from off-the-rack docs. The rest is strong, reasonably scientific and visually compelling. It doesn’t over-anthropomorphize its subjects by giving the orcas cutesy names like Floopsy-bear and Bob, but it does make those claims about love and joy that might be more difficult to assert without resorting to emotional arguments — especially when insisting whales are “just like us.” Here’s hoping the series catches us up on the latest scientific developments with whales; I’m certainly compelled to keep watching as it focuses future episodes on belugas, humpbacks and sperm whales.

Two random observances: One, Cameron gets his own ego-coda where he says how amazing Kerry’s footage is, as if we didn’t already know that, and says he’s working on Avatar 2 and Avatar 3. Neat? And two, orcas are cute as HELL.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: Is that orca smiling for the camera? I can’t tell. Can orcas smile? I don’t think they can smile. Why couldn’t it be smiling in whale language? I guess it could be smiling in whale language.

Sleeper Star: Seriously, I swear that orca smirked at Kerry for not wanting to chow on that ABC stingray.

Most Pilot-y Line: “Whales are the world’s most intelligent giants. But they’re still a mystery.” — Sigourney sets us up to learn something new about whales, hopefully

Our Call: STREAM IT. So far so good for Secrets of the Whales. Nature-doc lovers will eat this stuff up like, I dunno, a generous-of-spirit orca to a half-eaten stingray.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream Secrets of the Whales on Disney+