By NELLIE ANDREEVA, Source: Deadline.com
After recently signing on to reboot one classic TV show, Hanna-Barbera’s The Flintstones, Seth MacFarlane is taking on another iconic TV series, Carl Sagan’s Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. Fox has greenlighted Cosmos: A Space-Time Odyssey, a 13-part docu-series from Family Guy creator MacFarlane and late Sagan’s original collaborators – his widow, writer/producer Ann Druyan and astrophysicist Steven Soter. Envisioned as a successor to the Emmy and Peabody Award-winning original 13-part program, which was hosted by Sagan, the new Cosmos series will be hosted by renowned astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. Underscoring MacFarlane’s commercial appeal, Cosmos will air on Fox in primetime, something pretty unprecedented these days for a science documentary series on commercial American television. (The original series aired on PBS.) Fox will air Cosmos: A Personal Voyage in 2013, which is also when the network will launch MacFarlane’s Flintstones reboot. National Geographic Channel, which will co-produce Cosmos, will air a same-night encore of the episodes following their broadcast on Fox. The project is being done outside of MacFarlane’s overall deal with 20th Century fox TV. “Never more than at this moment in the modern era have we needed a profound reminder of the colossally important and exciting role that science, space exploration and the human quest for knowledge must continue to play in our development as a species,” MacFarlane said. “We should be vigorously exploring the solar system by now, and who better to inspire us to get there than Ann Druyan, Steven Soter, Neil deGrasse Tyson and, of course, Carl Sagan.” Continue reading
