Asia is a 2024 British television series co-produced by the BBC Studios Natural History Unit, BBC America, ZDF and France Télévisions. It focuses on wildlife and wild habitats in Asia, and was four years in the making. It consists of seven hour-long episodes. The series was filmed in 120 shoots in over 20 countries, including the Philippines, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Egypt, Israel, Russia, Japan, Nepal, Thailand, India, Oman, Pakistan, China, Malaysia, Iraq, Taiwan, Vietnam, Singapore, Mongolia, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Uzbekistan.

Episodes

Filming firsts

A number of firsts were achieved by this series; behaviours, spectacles and phenomena that had never been filmed or even documented before. Some of these include:

• Moorish idols chased by grey reef sharks
• Whirlpools, Komodo National Park
• Dusky sharks living by a power station
• Swifts predated upon by fish, Tham Lod Cave
• Tibetan foxes using domestic yaks as cover to hunt
• A mother Baikal seal blowing bubbles to allow her pup to breathe underwater
• Tibetan wolf hunting chiru
• Ussuri tube-nosed bat hibernation and emergence
• Two pairs of Bengal tigers mating within just 100 metres of each other
• Persian leopard female and cubs in Iraqi Kurdistan
• Checkered keelbacks hunting fish by a culvert
• Gobi bears
• Cannibalism in Socotran cormorants
• Mongolian wolves hunting tahki

Reception

Rebecca Nicholson in The Guardian described Asia as "a televisual wonder", praising the filming, editing, soundtrack and narration, but noted the script "toned down the rhetoric that permeated Planet Earth III". Jasper Rees of The Telegraph similarly noted there are "no climate change sermons", and approved of the series' focus on visuals. Nick Duerden, writing in i, complained that Asia's format is unoriginal, but still appreciated the "familiar spell" of an Attenborough nature documentary.