Hidden Kingdoms is an embarrassing and misleading attempt to create the life world of small creatures like rats, marmosets or large beetles and show their day-to-day struggles for food, breeding and maintaining territory.
The shows team overproduce every shot with high-frame slow motion sequences that are often interjected into something resembling live action footage à la "the Matrix". Completely overcooked foley fills entire episodes with preposterous sound FX, and whats worst of all is the lame computerized compositing effects, employed to show slow motion 'glory shots' of small creatures leaping to and fro. This is the only nature doco series I know of that uses a freaking BLUE SCREEN and comps its subjects in front of fake exotic backgrounds. The show's clearly too cheap and quickly produced to get rid of the fuzzy outline and obvious colour grading mistakes every time they appear. The soundtrack all-too-frequently blares loud Broadway style gangster music or massive classical crescendos while showing something as commonplace as a beetle climbing out from under some rice grains.
To be honest about the quality of camera equipment, there are occasionally some great close-ups of the critters on show in this series, but often the choppy and confusing editing, the endless music video style transitions and sheer lack of establishing shots evince an annoying sense of falseness that permeates these overproduced, wide-angled "power documentaries" or whatever they're supposed to be.
Its unfortunate that Stephen Fry got involved in this project as narrator. He's not exactly desperate for a paycheck, BTW. Trash television at its worst.
