Airdate: Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey

Now this is what I call alternative programming.

While a noisy Reality show is premiering Monday night on Nine, over on GEM is the Free to Air premiere of Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey.

The 13 part series which is executive produced by Seth MacFarlane and executive producer, writer & director Ann Druyan is a successor to Carl Sagan’s Emmy winning series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage.

This premiered on National Geographic in 2014 and attracted plenty of attention as event TV. It went o to win several Emmys. I fully expect it will still hold up 2 years later.

The series is hosted by renowned astrophysicist Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson. Cosmos is the story of how we discovered the laws of nature and found our coordinates in space and time. Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey brings to life never-before-told stories of the heroic quest for knowledge, transporting viewers to new worlds and across the universe for a vision of the cosmos on the grandest – and the smallest – scale.

“There’s never been a more important time for Cosmos to re-emerge than right now. I want to make this so entertaining, and so flashy, and so exciting that people who have no interest in science will watch just because it’s a spectacle,” said Seth MacFarlane.

The series invents new modes of scientific storytelling to reveal the grandeur of the universe and re-invent celebrated elements of the original series, including the Cosmic Calendar and the Ship of the Imagination. Uniting skepticism and wonder, Cosmos weaves rigorous science with the emotional and spiritual creating a transcendent experience.

One of the world’s most beloved science series, the original Cosmos: A Personal Voyage was a watershed moment in nonfiction television, changing the way audiences were able to look beyond our own world. For 33 years, the series has remained in ongoing worldwide distribution, seen by more than 750 million people in more than 175 countries.

8:40pm Monday on GEM.