Yeah, that is definitely the Sagan model for the show. More than the central person being self-obsessed, people tend to relate to a topic much better when a human face is involved. If anything, I'll admit this trailer is about 3x as long as it needs to be, but maybe for ComicCon or what-have-you, you can't just put up a 30-second spot.
You do realize it's strikingly similar to the original with the cheesiness, right? Did you watch the original? If not, why were you excited in the first place? Were you expecting space drama? An intergalactic action series? It's an educational show that's trying to capture a large audience. If it was just an astrophysicist standing up there teaching stuff, it would be boring. To be successfully educational on TV, you have to capture your audience; and increasingly brain-dead audience. The spaceship part, like the original Cosmos, will probably be very minor and only be used to segue into different areas. If you don't feel like watching an educational show, that's your prerogative, of course.
The original Cosmos has plenty cheese really. Sagan was flying in a spaceship analyzing info on a master data screen. Just Sagan made it look so graceful. And it was on PBS, so theyre not an expected source of "cool" points Actually, kinda yeah? Can't really tell from the trailer its an "educational" program. Maybe wanted to see Neil dropping some knowledge on these fools. But its mentioned that the formula has been copied many times and theres plenty other programs, they probably showed this sneak peek like this by design. And theres plenty time to go, theyll probably roll it out in imcrements and itll get to the source content more For me, I think its more the Seth Mcfarlane douchey poser intellectual element behind even that. Neil has credibility, Seth eh...but the intention is what counts.
I was pretty excited when i saw the thread. After watching the trailer... not so much. But i'll give it a shot of course. Now we gotta wait till 2014, which is plenty of time to watch the original series. *on a side note, it does look like they will go over some of the same concepts. A couple of the scenes in the trailer looked really familiar.
