“Frankly, we’ve got storylines that make Succession look tame,” says Vanessa Berlowitz.
She’s executive producer of Queens, National Geographic’s new series that features the most powerful females in nature.
With footage from some of the most remote places on Earth, Queens highlights matriarchies and female leaders around the world who tell a story of sacrifice and resilience, but also of friendship and love. However, these animals aren’t always kind or gentle, letting nothing come between them and the safety of their families.
Four years in the making and helmed by a female-led production team — groundbreaking in the natural history space — the seven-part series leverages cutting-edge technology to reveal surprising insights into how females in the natural world rise to power.
The final episode of the series celebrates the women who have gone to the ends of the Earth and dedicated their lives to documenting and protecting animal queens.
The series is narrated by award-winning actress Angela Bassett, who also serves as executive producer on the project.
In featuring female leaders for the first time, Berlowitz says that, “Every time we went out to the field, there was new stuff.”
The production team made a concerted effort to include a variety of species, says Chloe Sarosh, the series writer and showrunner. “We wanted every animal — from the tiniest ant to the biggest — to have their Hollywood moment.”
To craft the narrative, Sarosh says that they created storyboards containing what the teams hoped they might film, and, as she says, “we’d go out and either we’re lucky and it happens, or something completely different happens, or it doesn’t happen at all, and we flip.”
Sarosh says that, “One of the beauties of the series is that we wanted to episodes that were all incredibly different and had a very different dramatic storyline or theme so that you could sit and watch one, and then be entirely surprised by the next one.”
She adds that the series shows ‘parallels of sisterhood’ in some of the episodes, but, “it doesn’t mean they go about it nicely very often. It’s politics and power play and manipulation.”
With regard to the female production team, Sophie Darlington, director of photography says, “When I started out, you could count the number of wildlife camerawomen on one hand. We just didn’t exist.”
Sarosh reveals that, “Someone in our industry said, ‘Oh, Queens, that series the girls are making,’ and, obviously, all our hackles went up. Vanessa and I knew at that moment that not only did we have to make a great series, we had to make something that was better. To sit here four years later with all these amazing women and go, ‘Well, just look at the series those girls made,’ feels really good and really important.”
But, even given this, Berlowitz want it noted that, “The men that joined this production wanted to pay forward the opportunities that they’d had, and I think that was something I really felt when I took on this project.”
Highlights of the series include, as Darlington says, “the most incredible lion fight [captured] on a thermal camera in the middle of the night. It’s absolutely incredible. Tooth and nail, claw behavior, it’s a life or death thing.”
Producer and director Faith Musembi spent months, as she says, ‘watching an elephant’s bum’ trying to determine if the animal was pregnant.
“We had to spend a lot of time looking at bums and stomachs, and trying to determine, is this one pregnant, is it not pregnant? And then we started putting human qualities on the elephants, trying to figure out, ‘does this one look grumpy? Is it getting annoyed with the others, like, more than usual?’”
She says with a laugh, “But it was a very nice bum.”
Musembi also discovered that one of the elephants was blind and discovered that the massive animal responded to music.
“So, Somewhere Over the Rainbow was an actual song I played to her [as well as] Disney songs from different soundtracks,” all of which is shown in the series.
Berlowitz says that Queens stands out because when putting it together, “we gave the team permission to go with their hearts, and just feel instinctively where the story was, and where the best characters were.”
She says that, “conventionally, there’re set-piece dramas that you always go through, and it often does involve the males because they’re showy.”
But, working this way wasn’t easy as she admits, “It was nerve-wracking for me, and I’ve been doing it a long time, to actually go in without that set plan and just go for it.”
However, she learned, “Trust, and the story will find you.”
‘Queens’ premieres Monday, March 4th on National Geographic at 8/7c, and streams the next day on Disney+ and Hulu.
