Since everything from the eighties is getting rebooted these days it should not be that surprising that even nature shows like Cosmos is getting a new millennium version. But where the world did not really need a newer version of Endless Love, Cosmos actually deserved being updated because a lot has been discovered o the subject over the past thirty-four years. Plus, I for one, and probably everyone my age and younger than me, never saw the original.
Like the original, the updated series, this time with the subtitle A Spacetime Odyssey instead of A Personal Voyage, will air thirteen episodes. Stepping in for the dearly departed Carl Sagan is astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson who is probably best known to pop culture people for his cameo on the Big Bang Theory and his series of tweets last year criticizing Gravity (sample tweet: “The film #Gravity should be renamed ‘Angular Momentum’”). Near the end of first episode, Tyson gives a touching recollection of the time he met Sagan as a teenager.
Despite looking and sounding like one of the more interesting video your science teacher makes you watch when (s)he does not trust the substitute teacher to be competent, Cosmos is still a very compelling watch. First off we are introduced to Tyson’s “spaceship” (which looks like something out of the newer Star Wars trilogy) that will take us to the ends of the universe explaining our space “address” line by line giving the viewer of just where we are in the grand scheme of things.
Then we are transported back in time to the birth of Renaissance when Giordana Bruno first tried to suggest that Earth was not the center of the universe and that we actually revolve around the sun (which is with crudely drawn cartoons despite boasting Seth McFarlane as a producer). But the most fascinating part of the premiere is when Tyson has us look at the Cosmic Calendar which puts the Big Bang on January 1 and today on New Year’s Eve. Cosmos manages to take a very complex subject and put them in ways that the laymen should easily understand and should be appointment television for learners of all ages.
Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey airs Sundays at 9:00 on Fox. You can also catch each episode the following day at 10:00 on the National Geographic Channel. For those interested in (re)watching the original Carl Sagan version Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, the National Geographic Channel will be airing all thirteen episodes this weekend, from noon to 6:00 on Saturday and will continue on Sunday from noon to 7:00.
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