Cedar Wright/Nat GeoEdge of the Unknown With Jimmy Chin
Nat Geo
Premieres: Sept. 5 at 9:30pm ET/PT
Airs: Tuesdays at 10pm ET/PT (beginning Sept. 6)
What’s It All About? Oscar-winning filmmaking duo Jimmy Chin and E. Chai Vasarhelyi (Free Solo) are executive producers of this epic 10-part half-hour series that uses intimate interviews and self-shot archival footage to go inside the minds of some of the world’s top adventure athletes — including big-wave surfers, climbers, big-mountain snowboarders, polar explorers and kayakers — who recount the most consequential moments of their lives as they worked toward mastering their crafts.
“What drew me to telling these stories is the commitment level,” Chin says. “These aren’t sports, these are lifestyles. People have to make oftentimes extraordinary sacrifices to be able to do what they do, and [they] have faced some extraordinary challenges. … They make the extraordinary look easy, and it’s not, and sometimes people forget that. We want to show people what’s really happening behind what you normally see on TV … [and] understand what the real stakes are.”
Among the personalities detailed in the series are Sarah McNair-Landry, a second-generation polar explorer who came face-to-face with death while attempting to be the first to cross the Northwest Passage in the brutal, freezing winter; Angel Collinson, a big-mountain skier who survived a fall that sent her tumbling 1,000 feet down the side of an Alaskan mountain; Gerd Serrasolses, a kayaker who was knocked unconscious after falling down a 50-foot waterfall while filming in Mexico; and Chin himself, who is also a professional mountain athlete and recounts his own story of how a Class 4 avalanche transformed the way he approaches his work and life.
Despite harrowing moments such as these — and some of the amazing footage is indeed heart-stopping just from a viewer’s standpoint — the spotlighted athletes have continued to strive to master their pursuits, displaying a spirit that is something Chin also wanted to capture in Edge of the Unknown.
“A big part of the series is also to really highlight the joy of what we do,” he says, “those kind of mystical experiences, those transcendent experiences, those experiences of joy [as] we go seek and explore the edge.”
