Jimmy Chin Productions
When watching adventure films and documentaries about extreme sports—the kinds of things where people are hanging off the side of cliffs or jumping out of helicopters to ski down uncharted mountains—it’s hard to shake the intense anxiety of wondering: What would happen if something went wrong?
In the new National Geographic series Edge of the Unknown With Jimmy Chin, we find out.
The series is from the directing team of Chin and his wife, E. Chai Vasarhelyi, who won the Best Documentary Feature Academy Award for their film Free Solo. The movie is the prime example of the “This Is Very Stressful; What If He Falls?” documentary film genre. In it, Alex Honnold attempts to be the first person to climb El Capitan without any safety harnesses or equipment. Edge of the Unknown is an entire series documenting extreme examples of athletes and adventurers in the vein of Honnold: pushing the limit of what should be humanly possible to achieve—or, moreover, survive.