So we’re going to go in in there and light it.” This is an admirable (if unrealistic) goal, and one that Tyson seems to have embraced in episode one by inviting religious viewers to identify with scientists.Ībby: It’s interesting, because at least one early review of the show suggested that the reboot lost one of the things that made the original Cosmos so special: its ambitious view that every single person on the planet possessing an ounce of wonder could appreciate the cosmos, religious or not. He would aim to attract viewers “who don’t know that they like science,” but who “have a little flame inside of them of curiosity,” but also those “who know they don’t like science. How did the first episode of Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey treat religion?ĭanielle: Last week, Neil deGrasse Tyson promised Brian Stelter that he would be casting a wide net, audience-wise, with Cosmos. And - a trickier task - it does a lot of work to orient itself on a political landscape where not everyone seems to want to hear what science can tell us about our origins and surroundings.
And as much as we're fans of the 1980's space graphics of Sagan's, the visuals are lightyears away from what the original could do.Įpisode one walks viewers through the "cosmic address" of Earth, or where our home planet is located within the known universe. If the first episode is any indication, Tyson's version of Cosmos keeps a lot of the aggressive humanity and wonder that made Sagan's so great. And the second way: the line itself comes from the original Cosmos series. There's the obvious, that every atom in your body came from out there, a long time ago. It's a line that hits on two ways that the Cosmos series effectively spans the scale of time. "We are all made of star stuff," astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson tells us in episode one of Cosmos.