The original post: /r/television by /u/Robert_B_Marks on 2026-03-07 14:51:30+00:00.

Last night, my wife and I checked out the first episode of Netflix’s new series The Dinosaurs. Our hope was that it would be a proper successor to the original Walking with Dinosaurs, which our entire family loves. The good news is that Netflix was clearly thinking along the same lines. The bad news…

Well, the bad news is that while the first episode is trying hard, it’s a swing and a miss. Honestly, the writing is kinda bad.

What’s interesting, though, is comparing the two. The Dinosaurs fails to live up to its predecessor on two main counts:

  • Focus. Walking with Dinosaurs was a highly focused series. Each episode created a story with a specific group of dinosaurs, and we followed those animals from the start of the episode to the finish. The first episode of The Dinosaurs, on the other hand, bounces around with time jumps of millions of years, both backwards and forwards. The end result is that while Walking with Dinosaurs got us properly invested in the animals we were watching, The Dinosaurs never spends long enough on any one group for us to care. Or, put another way, Walking with Dinosaurs was giving us stories, and The Dinosaurs gave us snapshots.
  • Trust in the source material. You see this sometimes in creative work: the creator doesn’t really trust the source material to be compelling, so they “punch it up”…and this is what The Dinosaurs does. The thing is…the daily struggle of life and death IS compelling - it needs no help to grab and hold the viewer. Unfortunately, The Dinosaurs repeatedly goes for melodrama, creating results that are unintentionally funny (like the framing of herbivores vs. carnivores as a “rivalry”).

But, even outside of the comparison, the writing in isolation just isn’t very good. It starts by declaring that this will depict the dinosaurs as they have never been depicted before, which is a hell of a claim when TV documentaries have been using advanced CGI to do this since 1999. It declares that a small group of the first dinosaurs hatchlings are “the first of their kind” with “special skills” and then proceeds to kill off all but one of them on screen in a single chase and talks about what their descendants are going to do (“Divine conception incoming in 5, 4, 3…”).

To be honest, though, our kids will probably love it, and we’re planning to show it to them tomorrow. I imagine kids in general will love it. Adults, though…adults might end up having a blast riffing it (we did).