In an interview last year, Druyan lamented what she called a "retreat into magical thinking" in the post-Sagan world, and said she hoped Cosmos could help wake us from our stupor. Still, it's hard not to admire Macfarlane, Tyson and Druyan's achievement in getting so much carefully crafted science to what will, no doubt, be a huge global audience. We lose some of Tyson's own spark, wit and mischief. Perhaps the new Cosmos gets more confident in its own skin in subsequent episodes but, in the first at least, the new presenter seemed to be doing an impression of his predecessor. If I had one niggle, it is that Tyson (and the programme itself) seems rather too much in awe of Sagan – and shackled by his legacy.
He monologues about the nature of the universe while wandering clifftops and walking through improbably bright, soft-focus, hyper-real forests and cobbled Italian streets.Īmong the show's new teaching aids are manga-style animations depicting historical scenes, entire sections of the narrative given over to courtroom dramas, tales of travel, meetings in dusty-looking Oxford lecture theatres, voiced by A-list actors including Patrick Stewart and Macfarlane himself with a range of non-specific European accents. Tyson rolls and savours every word of Druyan's flowery script as if they were Shakesperean sonnets.
But Sagan's spirit infuses every minute of the new programme, not least in the visual style and writing. There is a lot of new science to add to Sagan's original 1980 series, which got a small update a decade later: dark matter, dark energy, the Higgs boson, genetic technologies, synthetic biology, and a multitude of new theories and discoveries for us all to get our heads around. Instead, Tyson persuaded him to consider backing a project by Sagan's widow and collaborator, writer Ann Druyan, to remake the venerable Cosmos for the 21st century. He wondered out loud to Tyson whether there was a scientific research project that he could help fund. With the proceeds of Family Guy and the even more foul-mouthed film Ted burning a hole in his pocket, Macfarlane wanted to give something back. Macfarlane decided to enter science broadcasting after meeting astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson at a regular lunch for Hollywood producers and scientists, who get together to discuss making the science in movies as accurate as possible. But Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, about the history of the known universe and everything in it, which begins next Sunday, would not have happened without the Family Guy producer's sweary cartoon creations. I f you wanted to remake the greatest science TV programme of all time, Carl Sagan's Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, your first choice of producer might not be Seth Macfarlane.
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