The original 13-part Cosmos: A Personal Voyage first aired in 1980 on the Public Broadcasting System, and was hosted by Carl Sagan. The show has been considered highly significant since its broadcast; David Itzkoff of The New York Times described it as "a watershed moment for science-themed television programming". The show has been watched by at least 400 million people across 60 different countries, and until the 1990 documentary The Civil War, remained the network's highest rated program.
Following Sagan's death in 1996, his widow Ann Druyan, the co-creator of the original Cosmos series along with Steven Soter, and astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson sought to create a new version of the series, aimed to appeal to as wide an audience as possible and not just to those interested in the sciences. They had struggled for years with reluctant television networks that failed to see the broad appeal of the show.
The show begins with a brief introduction recorded by President of the United States Barack Obama describing the "spirit of discovery" that the series aspires to give to its viewers.
Tyson opens the episode to reflect on the importance of Sagan's original Cosmos, and the goals of this series. He introduces the viewer to the "Ship of the Imagination", the show's narrative device to explore the universe's past, present, and future. Tyson takes the viewer to show where Earth sits in the scope of the known universe, defining the Earth's "address" within the Virgo Supercluster. Tyson explains how humanity has not always seen the universe in this manner, and describes the hardships and persecution of Renaissance Italian Giordano Bruno in challenging the prevailing geocentric model held by the Catholic Church. To show Bruno's vision of the cosmic order he uses an animated adaptation of the Flammarion engraving, a 19th century illustration that has now become a common meme for the revealing of the mysteries of the Universe. The episode continues onto the scope of time, using the concept of the Cosmic Calendar as used in the original series to provide a metaphor for this scale. The narration describes how if the Big Bang occurred on January 1, all of mankind's recorded history would be compressed into the last few seconds of the last minute on December 31. Tyson concludes the episode by recounting how Sagan inspired him as a student as well as his other contributions to the scientific community.
Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey has received very positive reviews from critics, and received a Metacritic rating of 82 out of 100 based on 19 reviews.
The miniseries won the 4th Critics' Choice Television Award for "Best Reality Series", with Tyson awarded for "Best Reality Host". The miniseries was also nominated for "Outstanding Achievement in News and Information" for the 30th TCA Awards and 12 Emmy Awards, including "Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Series". The program won the Emmy for "Outstanding Writing for Nonfiction Programming" and "Outstanding Sound Editing for Nonfiction Programming (Single or Multi-Camera)", and Silvestri won the Emmys for both "Outstanding Original Main Title Theme Music" and "Outstanding Music Composition for a Series (Original Dramatic Score)".
The new miniseries has been criticized by some Christians and the religious right for some of the views expressed by the show. Christian fundamentalists were upset that the scientific theories covered in the show "squashed" the creation story in the Christian bible. The Catholic League was upset that the science show "smears" Catholicism. A spokesman for the League noted how the show focused on Giordano Bruno who was persecuted by the Catholic Church for showing the Earth revolved around the Sun, and stated that the show "skipped Copernicus and Galileo—two far more consequential men in proving and disseminating the heliocentric theory—because in their cases, the Church's role was much more complicated".
