Documentary AreaSimply the best Documentaries

Hanging in the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, Seurat’s Les Poseuses is probably his least-known painting. It is also a picture brimming with codes and hidden meanings. It shows three nudes in the artist’s studio, but included in the background is Seurat’s famous masterpiece, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. Why is it there? What is it trying to say? Why two pictures at once? Waldemar Januszczak investigates.

The center of our galaxy is one of the most nightmarish places in the cosmos. It's the home to some of the most incredible forces the universe has to offer. Gas streaming everywhere, stars are being born and dying and exploding, radiation blasting out. And at the very heart is the super massive black hole, 4 million times the mass of the sun. But also the Milky Way, is our safe harbour, our island in this vast, cosmic ocean. And so to understand the heart of our galaxy, is to understand our home in this cosmic void.

David Attenborough reveals the extraordinary ways that some animals use colour to hide and disappear into the background. New science reveals how the Bengal tiger in central India uses its orange-black stripes to hide from its colour-blind prey. In Kenya’s Masai Mara, the zebra’s black-and-white pattern confuses predators with an extraordinary effect called motion dazzle. And on the island of Cuba, a small snail uses colourful stripes in a surprising way to hide from its enemies.
Other animals use colour to trick and to deceive. On Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, a blue-striped blenny uses colours to mimic other fish and launch a sudden attack. In the grasslands of Zambia, the chick of a pin-tailed whydah mimics the patterns of its nest mates to ensure that it is not detected as an imposter. And specialist cameras reveal how a tiny crab spider uses bright ultraviolet colours to lure in its victims.

The tropical island of Mauritius is home to Melrose maximum security prison, where 800 of the country's worst drug smugglers, sex offenders and murderers are locked up. Every convict is watched day and night and even the smallest infraction is met with extreme punishment.

In the last episode, despite disturbing revelations of wrongdoing at Three Mile Island before and after the accident, the utility fights to bring the plant back online. Its Unit 1 had its license temporarily suspended following the incident at Unit 2. Although the citizens of the three counties surrounding the site voted by an overwhelming margin to retire Unit 1 permanently in a non-binding resolution in 1982, it was permitted to resume operations in 1985 following a 4–1 vote by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
In 2017, it was announced that operations would cease by 2019 due to financial pressure from cheap natural gas, unless lawmakers stepped in to keep it open. Unit 1 shut down on September 20, 2019.
Billed as the worst nuclear incident in U.S. history, what’s particularly scary here is how close Three Mile Island incident came to becoming a national disaster. Without giving away the whole story, cost-cutting 'solutions' almost cause a catastrophic disaster.

A mammoth Tsunami strikes the eastern seaboard. It would be a disaster of epic proportions. Some scientists believe this catastrophe could happen one day, but how? This episode shows the Atlantic island of La Palma has collapsed several times in mega-landslides. Another could trigger a tsunami with enough power to cross the Atlantic Ocean and decimate the US East Coast.