INTERVIEW: New PBS series tells the human stories behind the human body
Photo: SOIL employees, standing outside a treatment plant in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, are featured in the new PBS series Human: The World Within. Photo courtesy of Etant Dupain / Provided by press site with permission.
Although a lot of science and nature programming takes the expansive view of how planet Earth and outer space were formed and developed, there are other series that decide to explore the biological depths on a more intimate level. Take, for example, the new six-part series from PBS called Human: The World Within, premiering Wednesday, May 5 at 9 p.m. This new show journeys quite far, but its distances are much more personal. There are examinations of the birthing process, heartbeats, the five senses and how humans react to the world around them.
Jonathan Soule is senior vice president of programming at Stephen David Entertainment, and his previous credits include The Men Who Built America, The World Wars and American Genius. Joining him on the creative team for Human: The World Within is Charles Marquardt, showrunner for the series and executive producer at Picture Island.
“I would say I think we all live these very busy lives,” Soule said in a recent phone interview. “We’re all involved in a lot of things, and we don’t necessarily stop for a minute and think about the bodies we inhabit and the things that are going on all the time, the almost miraculous things that are going on inside our bodies all the time. And so I think what we’re excited to present to the audience is this exploration of the human body. Each episode focuses on a different system inside the body, and we really dig deep and explore the human body, unlocking the secrets and then pop out to the big world and really try to follow some human interest stories all around the globe that sort of manifest the human experience.”
Those human-interest stories include parents who are preparing for a new addition to the family, a Navajo ultra-marathon runner, a Nigerian doctor who survived Ebola and a cell tower climber. Each of these featured people are meant to showcase the amazing qualities of the human body and how these interconnected systems can provide fuel, defend against threats and pulse with energy.
“I feel like what we’ve tried to do with this is create a science show that doesn’t feel overly academic,” Marquardt said. “It’s geared to the human interest side of things. It is not a comprehensive deconstruction of the systems of the body, but really peaks your interests in order to get you engaged in wanting to know more about each of the different systems we focus on within the human body.”
Both Soule and Marquardt walked away from this project with a lot more information on understanding these various topics. Throughout their discoveries they were able to attain more knowledge on what the human body is capable of. Soule, for example, reported that every single one of the six episodes left him with fascinating information that he had never thought about before.
“We all think about our brain at certain points in our day,” Soule said. “We think about the heart occasionally. I don’t think we’ve ever really considered the connection between the heart and the brain, and that is a constant, necessary connection. And it’s a connection that certainly has to do with regulating blood flow and things like that, but also so much emotional stuff is tied to the communication between the heart and the brain. Those sorts of things really got to me. I found it was really interesting how much of our emotional experience can still be linked to these organs inside of our body.”
Marquardt admitted that before this expansive project, which has been in development since November 2019, he never gave a second thought about the human systems, but now he truly feels an appreciation for how the body interacts with the outside world. “One issue that we tried to instill in the series is that we as humans are distinct but connected to everything around us through our biology and our physiology, and to me that was just a fascinating idea to explore,” Marquardt said.
The opening episode is titled “Birth,” a fitting introduction to the human body and this series. This is the experience that ties so much of humanity together: being birthed and being the product of human reproduction. The episode looks at a baby’s first breath, plus medical breakthroughs that save the lives of the mother and baby in the birthing process. There is space within this hour of programing that offers commentary on the universality of birth and the simultaneous uniqueness of the experience.
“We all have that experience of fifth grade, sixth grade where we had to watch the reproductive system and that very dry explanation of the process that got us to be where we are, the birthing process from conception all the way through,” Soule said. “I think we really wanted to steer away from that and really explore things that you may not think about all the time, things like how attraction plays so much into the process of getting a baby eventually born.”
Marquardt added: “We’ve tried to express stories about different aspects about being born into this world and how that starts with attraction and the way that the baby and mother have a cellular, chemical, biological bond, [plus the] challenges people have in trying to get pregnant and trying to conceive and then the wonderful miracle of birth. All of those are told through personal interest stories and people that actually have real-world experiences that are great examples that we use to get into those ideas.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Human: The World Within premieres Wednesday, May 5 at 9 p.m. on PBS. Click here for more information.
