They are built around interviews and discussions with historians, philosophers, politicians and people from the cultural sphere, interspersed with archive footage, film extracts and exterior shots.
[1] People who appear throughout the episodes include Jean-Pierre Vernant, Oswyn Murray, Nikos Svoronos [el; fr], Cornelius Castoriadis, George Steiner, Iannis Xenakis, Michel Serres, Theo Angelopoulos, Angélique Ionatos, Elia Kazan, Vassilis Vassilikos, Michel Jobert and Atsuhiko Yoshida.
[1][4] The series was produced by the then new French television channel La Sept with financial support from the Alexander S. Onassis Foundation in Greece.
This caused anger within the Onassis Foundation, which chose to block further distribution and responded that without modern Greece, the series would not have existed.
[3] When The Owl's Legacy was made available in 2018, Christophe Ono-dit-Biot [fr] of Le Point called it formidable and wrote that it offered "an experience of otherness that is as radical as it is essential for thinking about the world in which we want to live".
[4] In Le Monde, Mathieu Macheret called the series stimulating and beautiful, and said he appreciated that it assumed its viewers were intelligent and took upon itself to spread knowledge.