Brilliant ‘Life’ offers lessons from the wild

Hmm, sounds a lot like Tony Soprano’s rules.

The deadly dance of predator and prey captured so brilliantly in “Life’’ made me think not just of that lethal Jersey Boy but also of Tennyson’s line about “Nature, red in tooth and claw.’’ Watching this series, you realize two things: It is absurd to sentimentalize the animal kingdom, and it is impossible not to admire the near-miraculous resourcefulness that other species bring to the task of surviving and adapting.

Resourcefulness is a quality also possessed in abundance by the “Life’’ team of videographers, the unseen stars of this coproduction by the Discovery Channel and the BBC. I have no idea how they shot some of these scenes, but I’m glad they did, because they have captured on film (in some cases for the first time ever) the consistently engrossing and sometimes jaw-dropping variety of ways that mammals, reptiles, birds, and bugs have devised to hunt, procreate, and dodge danger.

The critters are not always successful, of course, which is what makes “Life’’ as much a suspense thriller as a nature documentary. (As with “Planet Earth,’’ the 2007 hit for the Discovery Channel, there are metaphysical reverberations galore in “Life,’’ implicit even in its simple-but-all-encompassing title.)

The first episode begins with a trip to Kenya, where we see three cheetahs launching a coordinated attack on a hapless ostrich. Bye-bye, birdie. But that’s the sort of stuff Marlin Perkins was showing us years ago on “Wild Kingdom.’’

Where “Life’’ stands out is in its stunning visuals and in the immediacy of its up-close-and-feral moments: A panther chameleon in Madagascar snakes out its suction-like tongue at 50 miles an hour and snatches a praying mantis off a leaf; a posse of 10-foot long Komodo dragons patiently stalk a water buffalo for two weeks across a small island in Indonesia until it expires of the venomous leg bite one of the dragons gave it; bottle-nose dolphins in Florida cunningly create “mud-rings’’ in the water that prompt fish to leap right into their grinning mouths.

Sometimes, there are happy endings, at least for the prey, if not for the hungry and frustrated predator. Menaced by a snake, a toad chooses to leap, seemingly to its death, only to stop its plummeting descent by grabbing a branch with one hand in a feat worthy of Indiana Jones. A young ibex instinctively knows that he can elude a fox by scampering onto a steep rock face; a seemingly doomed seal somehow wins his David-vs.-Goliath battle against a bunch of killer whales by keeping a small ice floe between him and them until they finally swim away.

If there are many ways to die and to avoid dying, there are also many ways to pitch woo. Some of the courtship rituals on “Life’’ are fairly strange, though probably no stranger than those seen on “The Bachelor.’’ We see huge bullfrogs battling like WWE wrestlers for the right to mate with desirable females, for instance, and an intrepid hippopotamus, looking for love, who decides to challenge an “overlord’’ hippo whose harem includes more than 200 females, only to be faced down and chased away.

But whether it involves mating or devising new feeding techniques or eluding peril, the striking thing is how ingeniously every species tries, and tries, and tries again. In the laudably matter-of-fact tone that characterizes the series, Winfrey reminds us that species that do not change face the distinct possibility of extinction.

It would be an overstatement to say that a similar penalty lies in wait for cable channels, even in today’s hypercrowded media environment. But it’s fair to say that after the popularity of “Planet Earth,’’ the Discovery Channel confronted the pressure-packed question of whether it could produce another water-cooler show.

The question’s answer? That’s “Life.’’

Don Aucoin can be reached at aucoin@globe.com.