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Nature is a weekly one-hour Nature Documentary series airing on PBS.

The series premiered on October 10, 1982, the brainchild of George Henson Page, then the director of science programming for New York public TV station WNET/Thirteen. Page narrated Nature from its inceptionnote  until 1998, when a bout with throat cancer forced him to step down; since then, narration duty has rotated between ecologists and documentarians, and well-known theatre/film/TV performers (with F. Murray Abraham narrating over 40 episodes as of 2019).

Over the last four decades, Nature has won 8 Emmy Award (out of 22 nominations) and a Peabody Award. It also spawned a three-issue graphic novel series from 2006-2008.

Nature has partnered with various producers of natural history content from around the world, including National Geographic and The BBC. In fact, many episodes of BBC's The Natural World were aired as part of this series (sometimes with edits).

See also NOVA, PBS's other long-running science program.


Nature provides examples of:

  • Land Down Under: The series has done many episodes about the natural history of Australia, including a six-part miniseries in Season 7 titled The Nature of Australia, for which the crew was lucky enough to film the outback in an abnormally wet couple of years that filled Lake Eyre (normally a bone-dry salt pan).
  • Narrative-Driven Nature Documentary: Averted. When animals are named in each episode, it is due to them being given names by the people studying them. What's more, emphasis is placed on providing information about the animals and ecosystems portrayed.
  • One-Word Title: Probably the Trope Codifier in natural history programming.


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