#COSMOS A SPACETIME ODYSSEY MOVIE#
#COSMOS A SPACETIME ODYSSEY SERIES#

#COSMOS A SPACETIME ODYSSEY MOVIE#

But he had a captivating style that helped him propel astronomy to new levels of 'cool.' He later married Ann Druyan, the show's co-writer, and together they collaborated on other books and the movie adaptation of Contact.

Cosmos was a huge hit: it's been seen by an estimated 700 million viewers worldwide, making it the Public Broadcast System's most successful show of all time.īy then Sagan had become an icon, more celebrity than scientist in the minds of many. With an $6 million budget for filming on 100 locations around the world and an arsenal of state-of-the-art special effects, he largely succeeded.

The tightly-scripted production, still viewable on Hulu and YouTube, strove (in Sagan's words) to be 'engrossing and captivating to a broad, general audience, while simultaneously portraying science accurately and even conveying something of what makes it tick.' Sagan had been disappointed with news coverage of the historic Viking landings on Mars in 1976, and he finally found backing for doing things his way. It was an audacious undertaking at a time when American audiences were still getting used to cable television and seeing Nova each week. Nature doesn't really come into the picture until the second episode, though, which contracts in as far as it initially expanded: DNA and molecules make the focus small, but vast in their own way.Astronomer Carl Sagan, as seen in a publicity photograph for the Cosmos series.

#COSMOS A SPACETIME ODYSSEY SERIES#

Visions of rogue planets seen only by infrared, and massive planet-sized hurricanes are all explored with amazing clarity, on par with other nature series of recent years. Mixing live action, animation and CGI, Cosmos' first episode generally outlines the known universe by using illustrative tools like a 'cosmic calendar,' to explain the passage of such large swaths of time. Tyson also brings things down to a personal level, speaking at length at the close of the first episode about a personal encounter with Sagan in his youth that helped cement his desire to become a scientist, which also pays homage to Sagan and the original series. Like Sagan before him, Tyson is a good ambassador of the universal, because he is able to explain even the most mentally tortuous concepts in ways that are able to be understood on a basic level (the series is also co-written, directed and executive produced by Carl Sagan's wife, Ann Druyan).

His involvement with Cosmos suddenly made the project's viability a toss up - which MacFarlane were we going to get? He can be brutally funny, then willfully obtuse (take, as exhibit A and B, Family Guy versus Dads). MacFarlane is a man of extremes, much of which was on display when he hosted the Oscars. One of the most focused-upon aspects of Cosmos is not its enthusiastic, friendly and well-respected (not to mention uber smart) host Neil DeGrasse Tyson, but MacFarlane. Hit the jump for whether it deserves its high-profile slot. A revival of Carl Sagan's seminal work Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, which was a massive hit on PBS in the 1980s, Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey goes on a visually masterful trek through space at the hands of popular astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, and his 'ship of imagination.' The 13-episode series, which will be running on a myriad of Fox networks, is the first time a documentary has aired in primetime in a very long time, thanks to a big push from executive producer Seth MacFarlane.

Cosmos a spacetime odyssey