The Hunt for Planet B (2021)

Taking us behind the scenes with NASA’s high-stakes Webb Space Telescope, The Hunt for Planet B follows a pioneering group of scientists, many of them women, on their quest to find another Earth among the stars. What begins as a real-time scientific adventure turns into a deep meditation on human longing. On the brink of seeing farther out than ever before, we find ourselves looking back at our own imperiled planet – and seeing it with new eyes.Good Grief, let’s hope that the James Webb Space Telescope is better at maintaining focus than this stinker of a documentary.I saw this program listed in the on-line TV listing I use, and based on what I read, I thought it was going to be a documentary on the James Webb space telescope. Man, was I ever mislead.A very, very tiny portion of it is in fact about the James Webb space telescope. But the even the portion that is actually about the James Webb gives you about three sentences worth of information about the James Webb. Less than they could have put into the promo for the program, if they had wanted to do that.For the most part, this program is actually snippets of a whole slew of very, very uninteresting people discussing their thoughts about the origin of life and about the prospects for finding extraterrestrial life. This is what this stinker of a documentary is actually about, and it isn’t even a half-decent documentary about the origin of earth life or the prospects for finding extraterrestrial life. It is a lousy, lousy documentary about the possible origins of life and the prospects for finding extraterrestrial life.I find this terribly annoying. If CNN wants to produce documentaries, why don’t they hire some people who have exhibited a smidgen of talent at producing documentaries? The people who made this piece of space junk didn’t even have a clear sense of what sort of documentary they were trying to make. They ended up with something that is horrifically unfocused and horrifically bad, so bad that it should never have been broadcast. They tried to make it seem like something other than what it actually is, by drawing attention to the James Webb Space Telescope.If you want to reduce the James Webb Space Telescope to a single idea, it would be the idea of seeing all the way to the edge of the known universe. It would not be about the search for exoplanets, and even if it were particularly about the search for exoplanets, it still would not be specifically about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. I actually sat through this thing twice, and I do not recall even once hearing anyone talk about the capability to see to the edge of the known universe.The people who produced and directed this piece of space junk should never again be allowed to produce another documentary, by anyone. And by the way, CNN, one way that you could make up for this wasted effort would be to make a broadcast-quality documentary on the James Webb Space Telescope. But I seriously doubt that CNN or anyone affiliated with CNN would have any idea how to go about doing that. Why is it that CNN consistently produces these really, really god-awful documentaries that are so outlandishly awful that hardly anyone can stand to sit through one of them?