Druyan:

When Carl was alive, he and I dreamed together of doing another series. It was in our long-term and delightful collaboration with Dr. Steven Soter. We thought of doing a series called Nucleus. We thought of doing a series called Ethos. Each of them would have been, in their own way, kind of a season of Cosmos. But that was, tragically, not to be.

So, after Carl’s death, I wanted to do another season of Cosmos. I joined forces with Steve Soter once again, and we invited Neil deGrasse Tyson to join us.

Steve and I created an outline for a new season of Cosmos, and for several years, we went from network to network, three in all. I think much to the horror of Steve and Neil and our other colleague, Mitchell Cannold, every network wanted to do Cosmos, but none of them would give me complete creative control, nor would they give me the money necessary to create the kind of cinematic, transporting experience that I felt very strongly Cosmos had to be.

So I was driving these guys crazy by saying no, without having another swing on the trapeze to grab ahold of, and just believing that it was better not to do it at all rather than to do something that would be designed by a network and budgeted by a network.

So, it didn’t happen for several years, until I met Seth MacFarlane. We had one of those great Hollywood dinners, where he promised me he would send me to the stars, that he would bring me to Peter Rice, who was then the head of the Fox television network and now has gone on to even greater things — and he did. Seth kept every single one of those promises.

He was absolutely passionate in his desire to see Cosmos. Not just that Cosmos would be a new season, that Cosmos would be produced, but that it would be on Fox, which was such an irony.

Of course, when Carl was alive and we were writing together, we didn’t write for the scientific publications. Well, he did plenty, but we wrote for Parade magazine, which was a Sunday supplement that reached 70 million people. We wrote about climate change. We wrote a piece called “The Warming of the World.”

This is going back to the ’90s and ’80s. It’s kind of dismal, actually, to think of how long scientists have been warning about the greenhouse effect of the building-up of carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere.

But anyway, the would-be producers said no, and then Seth brought us to Peter. He had missed the first run of the original series and was kind enough to say he would watch the DVD. He watched it with his kids, who were horrified that they were gonna be forced to look at what was then something like a 30-year-old science documentary.

But the thing that really turned Peter around was that his kids, after some chuckles at the beginning about Carl’s sideburns or whatever, they became obsessed with the show. They would call him at work and say, “Daddy, when are you going to come home? Can we watch another Cosmos?” That immediately persuaded him that it was time to do it.

I was thinking he was going to ask for a pilot. He said, “No. I’m ordering 13 from you.” I said, “Don’t you want a pilot?” He pointed to the DVD and he said, “No. That’s your pilot. You’re the only person on Earth who knows how to do this, so go do it.” He gave me absolute and complete creative freedom, and it was a tremendous joy to do it.

Besides Seth being our champion to Fox, the other thing that he did was he brought me together with Brannon Braga, who had a distinguished career in doing dramatic television — Star Trek and other series — very successfully. Brannon proved to be the absolute perfect collaborator for the second season of Cosmos, and now this third season of Cosmos.

So yeah, I have many stories that I want to tell, and I have a vision of what Cosmos, I think, really is.



Astronomy: In the second season overall, in 2014, the show had wandered considerably far from just astronomy. We heard about mechanics, chemistry, electromagnetism, and other subjects. Was that a big part of the show, not just to teach about scientific topics, but to teach people how to think scientifically?