From Blue Planet to RuPaul’s Drag Race – how content can change the world

Images of bottlenose dolphins playing with plastic bags, and sea turtles struggling to escape plastic nets, became so iconic that the narrative-shifts they helped create have been dubbed ‘the Blue Planet effect’. It’s one example of how what we watch can change what we talk about; Michaela Coel’s critically acclaimed I May Destroy You achieved similar success in opening up new conversations about sex and consent.  

But for every Blue Planet II or I May Destroy You, there are countless other attempts at social impact, public engagement, or behaviour change that fail. So why does some content help change the world, but much of it barely even entertains us? Can we explain the successes and failures, or is it just dumb luck?  

OKRE’s aim is to expand people’s understanding of the world through opening knowledge across research and entertainment. We believe that there’s order in the apparent chaos of how culture, society, and individuals respond to what we see on our screens – and we’d love to share some of our insights from over a decade’s worth of our previous work, including supporting TV, movies and games at the Wellcome Trust.  

We believe there are three ways people learn about the world – through research, through life experiences, and through the content we consume.  

‘Research’ could involve looking up your health condition online or asking a professional. ‘Experience’ would be your unique life events and context. And ‘content’ might be some depictions of your condition that you happen to come across in a movie or on social media. 

At OKRE, a key part of our work is to catalyse the creation of entertainment that benefits from alternative insights from research and lived experience. Our belief is that entertainment can change us in three ways – through our:   

• perceptions; how we feel, or relate to the world 
• knowledge and information; what we (think we) know and believe, and 
• behaviour; what we do, as a result. 

The fact that Gove was watching along does point to one of Blue Planet II’s limitations — epic, long-form natural history programmes appeal to some demographics, yet will leave behind others. The show’s success might also reinforce the faulty assumption that only issue-led documentaries can create this kind of change. Other media and genres can be just as powerful — if not more so.  

Nevertheless, Blue Planet II serves as an iconic example because it succeeded in shifting our perceptions. Audiences tuned in expecting to see virgin oceanscapes, untouched by pollution and human activity — an expectation cultivated through decades of creative choices by natural history film-makers. It was through meeting this expectation initially, but then defying it, that they shocked so many of us. 

The show’s producers achieved something innovative: in a heartstring-tugging show about toddlers, a traditional ‘talking head’ child-development researcher would have been jarring for audiences. But by subtly inviting viewers to join in over the scientists’ shoulders, we watched alongside the experts who were still relatable human beings. We laughed at the same things as the scientists, and by identifying with them we were brought in on the research-informed content. 

We work by connecting those three ways of understanding the world, to encourage collaborations that shift perceptions and expand understanding. From years of working with people from across many industries, we’ve identified three key ways to enable these exchanges of ideas, methods, and creativity:

• By being a global hub, making it easier for people from different backgrounds and traditions to meet, spark, and work together, we help them collaborate — including via our OKRE Development Rooms, Salons, and Retreats.
• Helping people see the value of collaboration, by telling and sharing the stories of how it goes right, including in our Content Hub. By doing this, we help people across our industries value the diversity of thinking that led to those stories — leading to more collaboration.
• De-risking and stimulating innovations at the nexus of research and entertainment. Check out our Funding Opportunities to see this in practice.

These outcomes form part of our Theory of Change, a foundational piece of work for OKRE which spells out how our work creates the kind of industry-wide changes that we think are both possible and necessary. And while this blog has focused on the implications for entertainment, we’re just as passionate about how research benefits from collaboration, too.  

As we continue on that mission, we want you to be involved. Whether you work in the entertainment industries, research or social impact, we want you to join us so we can create stronger links between these sectors and together, create real change. We want audiences and communities to tell us how entertainment can better understand and represent them, so we can focus our efforts. And we are looking for funders who believe in our purpose, to support our ambitious plans.  

Get in touch, and see what we can do for you.