Back in the ’80s, even Carl Sagan didn’t expect such a positive reaction to his original Cosmos: A Personal Voyage documentary series. The original season was released in 1980, aired in more than 60 countries, and picked up two Emmys and a Peabody Award.
A big part of the success was in the fact that, as Gizmodo notes, it took scientific theories and concepts and presented them in a way that’s easy to understand, using metaphors and everyday examples to illustrate the points to ordinary people. Topics covered in the first series included evolution, astronomy, space travel, relativity, the human brain, and others.
The second season, A Spacetime Odyssey, revived by Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane, was released in 2014 and explored topics like the wave theory of light, electromagnetism, global warming, and more.
This time around, it was late Carl Sagan’s wife, Ann Dryan that served as creator, executive producer, writer, and director of the latest season, Possible Worlds. Dryan was also the co-writer of the original series with Sagan. The new season will premiere on National Geographic, Monday, March 9th.
“This third season of Cosmos: Possible Worlds is our boldest yet,” she said in a statement. “The ‘Ship of the Imagination’ will carry us places we never dared to venture before: lost worlds and worlds to come, deep into the future and straight through that hole in the curtain masking other realities — and all of it rigorously informed by science and made real by lavish VFX.”
As with the second series, the host will be Neil deGrasse Tyson. The cast will also include MacFarlane as America’s 33rd president, Harry Truman, and Patrick Stewart as astronomer William Herschel.
