The Planets (Season 1)

The Planets (2019) is a BBC documentary series you can watch online on iFILM. Professor Brian Cox tells the life story of the solar system's eight worlds as if each were a character with a fate of its own. Across more than four billion years, every planet has had its own arc: born from dust, rising, then ruined.

Cox guides viewers from scorched Mercury out to the frozen edges, explaining how Venus became a furnace and why Mars lost its rivers. Directors Stephen Cooter, Martin Johnson and Nic Stacey weave real probe data into cinematic CGI, and the result feels closer to a feature film than a dry astronomy lecture. It pulls in people who never cared about space before, because the planets' histories turn out to be tangled together, and Earth's place in that story is far from permanent.