When Carl Sagan brought the 13-part television series Cosmos to PBS in 1980, he probably could not have imagined that it would become one of the most watched series in the history of American public television. Its record endured for years, and Cosmos remained the most-watched series broadcast by PBS according to the source. If people around the world today possess greater general knowledge of the cosmos than earlier generations, the article argues, much of the credit belongs to this program and to Sagan's other work. Across those 13 episodes, he presented astronomical phenomena and the scientific developments of his time to a worldwide audience in unusually accessible language.
More than thirty years later, beginning that night at 9 p.m. U.S. Central Time, a new season of Cosmos was scheduled to air on FOX, hosted by the well-known Neil deGrasse Tyson.
Tyson himself, however, told Rolling Stone that the purpose of the new Cosmos was not simply to deliver the latest astronomical news. During the preceding three decades, the media industry had changed dramatically, and countless documentaries from around the world were already communicating new discoveries in many forms. Merely reproducing the style and purpose of the original series would therefore be pointless. The question was whether the new Cosmos, benefiting from enormous advances both in our understanding of the universe and in media production, could establish a place comparable with its predecessor.
Neither Tyson claimed, nor did the author expect, that he could simply occupy the unique position Carl Sagan had created. Nevertheless, the article conveys considerable anticipation for the new series: this new Cosmos was beginning that night, now for our generation.
Notes
1 PBS, the Public Broadcasting Service, is one of the major public radio and television networks in the United States.
2 The original article's biographical note, drawn from Wikipedia, describes Neil deGrasse Tyson as an American astrophysicist and science communicator, director of New York's Hayden Planetarium and a research associate in astrophysics at the American Museum of Natural History. It notes his role in debates over the definition of planets and Pluto's reclassification, his books and public science work, his StarTalk podcast, a guest appearance on The Big Bang Theory, and asteroid 13123 being named in his honour.