I’m looking forward with trepidation. I enjoy the Universe series, but the production values are skimpy, and the presentation is somewhat overly dramatic for my tastes.
I have reservations about Neil de Grasse Tyson for a lot of reasons, mainly intellectual depth, and his willingness to make gratuitous and ill-framed comments about things outside his expertise, like religion, for instance. If you could get him to just stick to basic astronomy he’s not a bad presenter. Unfortunately, he is also much more opinionated than knowledgeable about the history of astronomy.
I personally found Sagan off-putting and didn’t appreciate the original Cosmos. I worked with a guy who took his PhD in physics at Cornell a couple of years after Sagan, and was a graduate student when Sagan was finishing his graduate studies. He had a few Sagan anecdotes. His first impression of Sagan was at a colloquium, where Sagan was the only graduate student who spoke right up, along side the professors and post-docs. After getting his PhD, my colleague worked at Arecibo, which was managed by Cornell. Sagan used to come down during winter break to play volleyball and have a few rum and coke-cola with the co-ed grad students, not interferring much with the administration and work of the actual facility. Sagan was the perfect TV scientist.
“Sagan was the perfect TV scientist”
Right, he put a public face on science, he sold it.