Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey airs Sundays on FOX beginning March 9 and Mondays beginning March 10 on NGC.
In 1980, legendary astrophysicist Carl Sagan delivered the universe to living rooms across America via his groundbreaking PBS series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. Cowritten with his wife Ann Druyan and his fellow astrophysicist Steven Soter, the Emmy-winning, 13-episode event spellbound viewers of all ages with its innovative explorations of space, astrology and astronomy, evolution and the future of planet Earth.
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Now Druyan and Soter have teamed up with executive producer Seth MacFarlane — yes, the Family Guy guy — and popular astrophysicist and cosmologist Neil deGrasse Tyson to launch the next generation of Cosmos as a joint project of FOX and National Geographic Channel.
Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey combines new means of scientific storytelling with updated takes on celebrated elements of the original Sagan series, including the Cosmic Calendar and the Spaceship of the Imagination — a must for MacFarlane, who said he watched the original series as a child and again as a high-school student, when he really grasped its power.
“I had always been a fan of Cosmos,” MacFarlane told critics at a recent press event. “I met Neil through an organization that Jerry and Janet Zucker put together called The Science & Entertainment Exchange and found out he was working with Ann on doing a new Cosmos. And I thought that there was a strong possibility that this particular regime at FOX — as creative and open-minded as they are — would be receptive to the idea of doing the show on the network, and sure enough, they were.”
Accessibility to the wonders of science has always been the backbone of Cosmos, says Druyan, who admits she was an indifferent student who fell in love with science as she fell in love with Sagan.
“Cosmos is taking the story of the universe, the story of the people who brought us this knowledge, and it’s telling it so that everyone can feel it and enjoy it — and be entertained by it, be moved, be taken across the vast expanses of space and time back to the beginning of the universe and into the future,” she said. “If you have a beating heart, you will respond to Cosmos.”
Image credits: FOX