[1] It was filmed in HD, and premiered on November 7, 2010 with accompanying coverage in the National Geographic magazine and an official companion book.

The series airs on the Sundays of the same month, spread across four hour-long chapters, excluding three supplemental hours which run on other dates.

[2] The production team traveled 420,000 miles (680,000 km) over two and a half years tracking multiple species ranging from army ants to Mali elephants.

Filming provided rare footage of various animal scenes, including the documentation of an elephant's funeral for the first time outside East Africa.

The Washington Post remarked on the show's "compelling grandeur"; reviewer Tom Shales noted how contemporary nature films would inevitably be compared with the BBC classics, Planet Earth and Life.