Mother Nature Is Our Entertainment: How Natural Themes Are Influencing Popular Culture
The natural world and weather play a massive role in dictating our daily activities, and for this reason, humans are fascinated with them.
This is shown by the ever-increasing prevalence of these themes in the entertainment industry, where documentaries and reality TV shows offer different ways the physical world can make an impact.
British broadcasting legend David Attenborough’s ‘Planet Earth’ has riveted audiences with its spectacular footage for years.
At the same time, Jeremy Clarkson’s ‘Clarkson’s Farm’ shows how nature plays a role in the day-to-day running of a new business.
The trend is even extending its reach into other mediums, such as online gaming, where the visual power of the extreme weather can heighten a user experience.
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Popular Nature-Themed Entertainment
The extremes of our planet are fascinating to us, and that’s why more and more audiences are clamoring for content that help us experience it. This can be from the build-up of tension in a game to the pertinent questions raised in documentaries.
Take Paddy Power’s new offering of Live XXXtreme Lightning Roulette for example – a fast-paced casino game that uses stormy imagery to help build tension while the player waits for an electric payout thanks to its lightning bolt payout multipliers. Research has shown that modern audiences are also more tuned in to the connotations of extreme weather, its causes, and its effects, which could explain the uptick.
Documentaries like the BBC’s Planet Earth and another Attenborough work ‘Weather’ have helped to plot the correlation between human behaviour and Earth’s future, with increasingly volatile meteorological conditions affecting all corners of the globe.
Viewers will witness everything from thunderstorms to floods and droughts, all of which can have catastrophic effects on human and animal populations.
These are as breathtaking as they are poignant and deliver a clear message that our climate should be a huge priority for all of us.
Home-grown Nature
However, people also want to see things a little closer to home, which is where the likes of Amazon Prime’s Clarkson’s Farm come in.
The popular Amazon series has consistently done impressive numbers despite the humble backdrop of a farm in England’s Cotswolds.
Viewers have taken an interest in both local farming issues and the entertainment that can ensue when a newcomer gets involved with them.
It might not be dramatic storms and exotic wildlife at Diddly Squat Farm, but the weather steers Clarkson into some problems throughout the multiple series of the show, proving just how tough and fragile the economy of an agriculturalist can be.
While he was once known as a car-loving petrol head, the British presenter has reinvented himself as a proponent of the countryside.
From the incredible to the mundane, viewers can’t get enough of the natural world in their viewing, and it’ll be interesting to see what fresh ideas will come to our screens in 2025.
