4 out of 5

Written by: Ann Druyan and Steve Soter, based on Cosmos: A Personal Voyage by Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan and Steve Soter

There’s no way to not feel smart watching Cosmos.  You can feel sophisticated after a sober viewing of the latest BBC nature documentary, but that niggling feeling that you’re just in it for the cute animals is probably true.  But Cosmos is science, smart stuff you can drop into conversation (hoping your conversation mate didn’t also just watch the show) and it’s stuff you half paid attention to in school, only now, for whatever reason, it seems interesting.  It is interesting.  The structure for ‘Cosmos’ – lifted from the original, updated to the now – isn’t really pulling any punches as to its subject matter: we get into the nitty gritty of how things work, great and small, peeling out toward theoreticals when the factual stuff don’t cover it.  And as presented by Neil deGrasse Tyson, we feel infinitely respected: Tyson brings a seemingly legitimate sense of awe to his explanations, but with the kind of articulation that convinces us that he knows his stuff, or, if it falls outside of his area of expertise, his confidence suggests he wouldn’t be telling us these things if he didn’t believe them.  Of course, there’s much more to the picture than just cool facts and a good host: our producers understand how helpful engaging visual aids can be, and thus leverage plenty of computer effects and different presentation mediums – primarily animation – to keep things from becoming talking heads or still images.  The advancements in affordable TV technology (and, again, Tyson’s general likeableness) even make the ‘ship of the imagination’ – in which our host ‘travels,’ allowing us to peek through space and time – a fun quirk of the show, sharing with us that sense of awe as we investigate things of all shapes and sizes.  Taken week by week as broadcasted, ‘Cosmos’ is a refreshingly straight-forward show that simply relies on reality to remain fascinating; there are environmental themes that may seem like a preachy sidestep, but as these aspects are always preceded by evidence which actually relates to the theme, it doesn’t feel overly moralistic.  However, there is an oddity when you binge on the show: the writers seem to forget that we were just here last episode.  The timeline jumps around somewhat out of necessity to broach smaller ideas before getting into large ones, but Tyson revisits some stories multiple times in the same way like they’re brand new, and the ‘cosmic calendar’ convention, used to show the relative scale of humanity’s time on Earth as compared to the span of known time, is another great visual aid but similarly re- and re-presented to us as though we didn’t just see it.  I can understand the approach to not consider this an episodic series and to truly write each episode to stand on its own, but the approach can also be a little alienating and derail your binge-watching momentum.