The 14 best science and tech documentaries of 2025 so far, from David Attenborough to Hannah Fry

Netflix
Bryan Johnson is an unusual fellow by anyone’s standards. A millionaire venture capitalist and anti-ageing evangelist, he wants to push his lifespan and “healthspan” to the very limits by taking a daily cocktail of nearly 100 drugs and following a strict fitness regimen. The real miracle of Don’t Die is how it manages to wrench any sympathy for Johnson from the audience. His lifestyle is based on a deeply flawed approach to science, but his mindset is far more interesting than those of his tech bro contemporaries.

Disney+
There is a sequence in Ocean with David Attenborough that is as horrifying as anything I have watched all year: a bottom trawler’s mechanical teeth puncture the seabed, churning through sediment as fish are swept into an enormous net. Attenborough’s most political project to date is a disaster film, warning of the catastrophic environmental consequences of industrial fishing practices. If this is indeed some of the 99-year-old’s final work, as he hints at in the documentary, it will do his lengthy career justice.

BBC iPlayer/NBC
Who is the US equivalent of David Attenborough, a man whose voice is synonymous with the finest British programming? Your best bet may be the silver-screen credentials of two-time Oscar-winner Tom Hanks. He narrates this 10-part natural history series all about the incredible biodiversity of the Americas, lending it a glossy, cinematic sheen. Expect little insight into the climate crisis here, but what it lacks in real-world relevance, it (almost) makes up for with its gorgeous cinematography.

BBC iPlayer
Twenty years ago, Bruce Parry spent months living among Indigenous communities as part of the anthropology series Tribe. Now, the programme returns, but in a very different world. With deforestation and displacement even greater threats now than they were in the early 2000s, Parry must do even more to gain the trust of the groups that host him, none of which has permitted outsiders to visit before. There are so many fascinating scenes in Tribe – from piranha fishing and political meetings to yagé(ayahuasca) rituals – that you only wish we could spend more time observing. The brief access we are granted via Parry feels like a gift.

Netflix
We have long leveraged the innocence of children for entertainment – child actors of the 1920s and 30s were forced to work long hours, given amphetamines and even pushed into near-death experiences. The 21st-century variant of this horrendous practice is “kidfluencing”, when families build financial empires off the online antics of their precocious children. Bad Influence follows child pageant star and dancer Piper Rockelle, who was allegedly exploited by her “momager” after rising to fame at age 9. Warning: this is a truly grim look at the darkest side of social media.

BBC iPlayer/CNN
While the early days of Facebook are infamous thanks to the David Fincher film The Social Network, Twitter’s origins aren’t so well-known. Twitter: Breaking the Bird traces the company’s history all the way back to when it was a simple platform for posting status updates. The film is most interesting when covering the internecine power struggles between Jack Dorsey and his fellow founders; it also delves into the technical issues that have plagued the social media platform since its inception. And did you know that Twitter (or X, as it’s now known) could have started off with the name Ketchup or Friend Stalker? But its later chapters are also a welcome reminder that the myriad problems at Twitter didn’t begin with the volatile presence of Elon Musk – the cracks were there from the very start.

BBC iPlayer
Last year, naturalist Chris Packham presented Inside Our Autistic Minds, a two-part documentary that saw autistic people make films to try to express how their minds work to their loved ones. The follow-up season focuses on ADHD and dyslexia, two other highly misunderstood conditions. While the series largely focuses on the social challenges that can come with ADHD and dyslexia, there is good science to back things up, with some great insights into the neurological underpinnings of these conditions. There is also a welcome focus on the positives of ADHD and dyslexia, such as the enlightening fact that many people with dyslexia have above-average pattern-recognition abilities.

Netflix
From the makers of My Octopus Teacher comes Pangolin: Kulu’s Journey, the story of a baby pangolin saved from the illegal wildlife trade. Underweight and traumatised when he was rescued, Kulu must be rehabilitated by his handler Gareth before he can be released into the wild. Gareth describes himself as a helicopter parent – he certainly spends a lot of time hauling Kulu out of warthog burrows before nightfall approaches. It is all unbearably cute, and while it is fair to say that Pangolin: Kulu’s Journey is a touch too sentimental, it’s also hard not to feel an intense affection for this strange, sensitive creature and his brethren. As the world’s most trafficked wild mammals, pangolins will need plenty of goodwill from humans if they are to survive.

BBC iPlayer
Season three of Hannah Fry’s guide to the everyday technologies we rely on is as enchantingly informative as always. This time round, she investigates rollercoasters, motorways and (inevitably) air fryers. This is highly detailed stuff, and delving into the nitty-gritty of this taken-for-granted tech results in some surprising discoveries. How did the inventor of the theremin influence the doorbells on our homes today? Why were frisky chickens key to the creation of fridges? And what, exactly, is an air fryer’s starfish? If you’ve ever been tempted to take apart your appliances to learn how they work, let this charmingly small-scale series will save you from violating their warranties.

Amazon Prime Video
We have got to know individual octopuses in quirky roles: psychics, escapologists and unlikely teachers. How wonderful, then, to have this two-part series about our tentacled friends and their extraordinary abilities. Our beautifully animated guide to the life cycle of these creatures is Doris, a giant Pacific octopus that beats the odds by surviving her dangerous childhood and going on to reproduce, dying shortly afterwards. Despite that unhappy ending, Octopus! is a light-hearted documentary full of curiosity and humour.

NOW
Science fiction is our most potent means of imagining the future – and that future is often bleak. The primary aim of this four-part documentary is to chart how sci-fi dreamed up the atomic bomb, then taught us how to relate to it, with fear and fascination that would go on to poison humanity’s relationship with everything else on the planet. Beyond that, though, Wonderland is a thoughtful, rigorous consideration of the past 80 years of sci-fi in all its forms, not just the most apocalyptic or traditional. This is a welcome salve for all those wounded by the surface-level analysis too often afforded to the genre.

Netflix
In 2023, the world was gripped by the four-day search for the missing OceanGate Titan submersible, which had disappeared on a trip to see the wreck of the Titanic. We would eventually learn that the five people on board, including OceanGate co-founder Stockton Rush, had been killed almost instantly after a fatal implosion. This feature-length documentary reveals how ego and negligence led to those tragic deaths. One particularly chilling sequence sees Rush on an early test dive, listening to an acoustic monitoring system that signalled when the carbon-fibre hull was cracking under deep-sea pressures to a dangerous extent. The company later abandoned this vital safeguard.

Disney+/NatGeo
In 1983, Sally Ride was NASA’s golden girl: the first US woman to go to space, she was among the most famous people in the world, even appearing on Sesame Street. But she and her fellow female astronauts were subject to institutional sexism and invasive media attention. This feature-length documentary is framed around the personal life Ride fought to keep private, including her 27-year relationship with Tam O’Shaughnessy during a deeply homophobic period in US history. There are plenty of fascinating details about Ride’s career too, such as how the hand-eye coordination she honed in her former tennis career gave her the edge over colleague Judy Resnik, who would be placed on a later mission that ended in the Challenger disaster.

BBC iPlayer
Back in 1999, Walking with Dinosaurs was a TV sensation, transporting viewers to our prehistoric planet through some cutting-edge-at-the-time visual effects. Those visuals have dated a little since the show first aired, so the time was ripe for a reboot. In each episode of the 2025 series, researchers play detective, uncovering ancient remains and then extrapolating a wealth of information from the bones and the surrounding environment. These imagined stories are charming and moving by turns, whether we’re watching a baby Triceratops chase a dragonfly through the jungle or an Albertosaurus pack cornering their prey. Take it all with a pinch of salt, of course: there is much about dinosaurs’ lives that we do not and cannot know.