Chimp Empire

The Forest as a Boardroom

I didn’t expect to care about a chimpanzee’s midlife crisis. But there he is—Jackson, the aging alpha of Ngogo’s Central group, his once-muscular frame now softened by time, his reign under siege by younger, hungrier males. The camera lingers on his face (if you can call it a face; it’s more a map of scars and wary intelligence) as he surveys his dwindling allies.

He doesn’t roar. He doesn’t charge. He just sits there, gripping a branch like it’s the armrest of a throne no one wants him to keep.

And suddenly, I’m thinking about my own father at 50, still pretending he’s the man he was at 30, still hoping no one notices the way his hands tremble when he pours his coffee.

That’s the trick of Chimp Empire, Netflix’s four-part documentary series about the Ngogo chimpanzee community in Uganda’s Kibale National Park. It doesn’t just show you animals. It shows you us—our hierarchies, our betrayals, our desperate, ridiculous, heartbreaking need to matter.

And it does it without a single line of human dialogue.

Director James Reed, who won an Oscar for My Octopus Teacher, knows the power of a well-timed close-up. The series is shot with the intimacy of a prestige drama, the kind of access that makes you forget you’re watching wild animals and not, say, the Roy family from Succession but with more hair and fewer board meetings. The Ngogo chimps—all 200 of them—are filmed as if they’re characters in a political thriller.

There’s Jackson, the aging patriarch clinging to power. There’s Abrams, the ambitious upstart with a taste for violence. There’s Gus, the loyal lieutenant who might just be biding his time.

And then there are the females, navigating this testosterone-fueled chaos with the weary pragmatism of women who’ve seen it all before.

The comparison to Succession isn’t mine. It’s everywhere. Critics have latched onto it like a chimp to a vine, and it’s not hard to see why.

Both stories are about power—who has it, who wants it, and what they’re willing to do to keep it. But where Succession is a masterclass in verbal cruelty, Chimp Empire is all physicality. The chimps don’t plot in conference rooms; they plot in the mud, in the trees, in the tense silence before a charge.

Their weapons aren’t words but teeth, fists, the sheer force of their presence. And yet, the effect is the same. You watch, riveted, as alliances form and shatter, as loyalties are tested, as the weak are culled and the strong rise—only to be toppled in turn.

Mahershala Ali’s narration is the glue that holds this together. His voice—warm, measured, just a little weary—gives the chimps’ lives a weight they might not otherwise have. When he says, “Jackson fears the West,” it’s impossible not to hear the capital letters.

The West isn’t just a direction; it’s a faction, a threat, a looming shadow over Jackson’s reign. Ali doesn’t just describe what’s happening; he interprets it, turning raw footage into a story with stakes, with characters, with meaning. It’s a masterful performance, even if it’s one that some critics have called too masterful.