Ford orders new Raging Planet for Discovery’s Awesome Sundays

Discovery Channel in the US has ordered a second season of extreme weather series Raging Planet, eleven years after the first series was a hit for the channel.

John Ford, Discovery Channel’s president and general manager, commissioned the series personally from UK indie Pioneer and it will open up a new weekly Awesome Sundays slot that kicks off next week.

Discovery will use the two-to-three hour weekly slot to showcase big-ticket series and specials.

Alice Harper, the series producer on Raging Planet describes it as ‘the Planet Earth of weather’. The original series went out in 1998 and was a success on the Discovery Channel and the Science Channel.

“John Ford is back at Discovery and it was his idea to revisit the Raging Planet brand,” says Harper. “We then set out to make a coffee table book of a show with glorious pictures and fascinating facts. We wanted viewers to sit back and enjoying watching the pictures, it’s not so much a documentary as an enjoyable visual process.”

John Ford rejoined Discovery in 2007 after a stint as executive VP of programming at the National Geographic Channel.