What makes it different from others?

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

Blistering performances.

One of my all time favourite documentary tv shows. The show much like National Geographics Aftermath Population Zero was inspired by the book The World Without Us by Alan Weisman. But to bad that this series only ran for 2 seasons. I Love seeing how nature could make a comeback in a big way if humans just somehow stop the destruction. But just as in Aftermath and The World Without Us, In this show it is if humans all disappeared for some unknown reason. Love how they back up their beliefs with evidence.

Warning, Semi Spoiler Alert. How could you create a show about Life after People, without saying what would happen to the earth with no one maintaining the offshore oil rigs or nuclear power plants? Without constant maintenance, the nuclear power plants would surely fail within days. The offshore oil rigs would decay and begin spewing oil into all of our oceans in months or a year or two. Posably/probably ending the earth's ability to repair itself for millions of years, if at all. In my opinion, this show is void of any real substance or reality. I assume you avoided these facts because, including them would pretty much make the rest of the show irrelevant.

The show certainly makes one think about how impermanent our impressions on the planet really are. The show is "applied archeology" or maybe archeology meets maintenance engineering. Overall the shows are worth watching because they are interesting and show many things in building, bridges, tunnels, factories, etc. that most of us will never see. Support for the scenarios they portray comes from interviews with experts; experts from engineering, from authors on "day after" books and from civil and maintenance engineers. However they don't give alternative views on what might happen, so that makes it a little less than scientific. On the down side, the shows are repetitive, often repeating the same clips within one show and across many shows. They dampen any surprises with repetition and with "pre-announcing" what's coming. Also there's little consideration of civilization in South America and Asia. And outside of a few examples (ex: pyramids) they tend to give little air time to existing, long term artifacts of mankind.

I am not sure that the series doesn't just use snippets of the original show, I have seen some episodes where I think I saw the same thing on the show. It is entertaining, and shouldn't be taken too seriously. I have a problem, as many have already argued, that the scenario for the absence of humans is not given any thought. Therein lies the problem with the show and series, you can't really speculate on what happens the hour, week, month after people if you don't explain what happened to neutralize humans around the world at the same time. If we do become extinct, it would more likely be phased out. Anything drastic enough to destroy us all would certainly destroy other forms of life too. Anyway, sometimes when channel surfing, this is about the best thing on, and worth a watch or two.