The BBC built this series around computer-generated imagery rather than telescope footage, reconstructing the solar system planet by planet from the surface of Mercury to the ice giants Uranus and Neptune. Director David McNabb's team renders storms on Jupiter, the rings of Saturn, and the frozen wastes beyond Pluto in enough detail to substitute for pictures no probe could actually take, then lets Brian Cox narrate the physics and history behind each image. The series treats the Moon landing and the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud as part of one continuous story about how the solar system formed and where it is still active, with asteroids and comets folded in as leftover material from that formation. Earth gets its own episode too, framed as one planet among the others rather than the default setting. The animation is doing the work a real spacecraft camera can't, showing surface conditions and atmospheric behavior no one has photographed directly, which is the series' actual reason for existing.