Neil DeGrasse Tyson Will Feed Your Nerdstalgia With 'Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey'

For some of us, Carl Sagan's 1980 series Cosmos is an almost mythic memory -- Kid Zoom knows that one sure way to get Dad all sentimental (and maybe even weepy) is to just queue up Vangelis's theme music from the series. Those shots of Carl Sagan staring in pretended rapture at the viewscreen of his dandelion-fluff "ship of the imagination" were simultaneously cheesy and awe-inspiring -- the man had an infectious SensaWonder that he invited us all to share -- and we really are made of star stuff.

So it makes perfect sense that if anyone can pull off a reboot/update of Cosmos, it's Neil deGrasse Tyson, the director of the Hayden Planetarium (also notorious as one of the scientists who killed Pluto -- though he likes to say, "I only drove the getaway car.") Tyson studied under Sagan, and not just in astrophysics -- Tyson is every bit the media expert that Sagan became, if perhaps a bit more suited to The Daily Show than just PBS. And so tonight we'll see what this new Cosmos -- no longer "A Personal Voyage" but now a more grandiose sounding "Spacetime Odyssey" -- looks like. The special effects will be top-notch Hollywood CGI this time around, but the goal remains the same: to bring science to a popular audience and infotain us into some learning.

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