Show of the week: North America

Nature documentaries seem to have made an evolutionary leap several years ago. Adopting the ambition of the 2006 series Planet Earth, this seven-part series portrays life on our vast continent to be a survival-of-the-fittest saga played out by very photogenic creatures on a grand stage. In the stirring first episode, orcas hunt gray whales off the Aleutian Islands, wild mustangs clash in the Utah desert, and tornadoes whip across plains made vulnerable by the continent’s unusual lack of an east-west mountain range. Tom Selleck narrates. Sunday, May 19, at 9 p.m., Discovery

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