It’s like trying to remake “Citizen Kane.”

In “Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey,” which begins on Sunday, Neil deGrasse Tyson takes the guide-to-the-universe role filled in the original “Cosmos” by Carl Sagan, a man who was so good at popularizing science that the American Astronomical Society awards an annual public-communication medal in his name. The original 13-part series, broadcast on PBS in 1980, has been seen by hundreds of millions of people throughout the world and made a profound impression on many of them.

Don’t expect the new version to make that kind of television history. It may put up some pretty good viewership numbers, since it is being heavily promoted and shown on multiple outlets, including Fox on Sunday night and the National Geographic Channel on Monday. Hats off to Fox for putting a serious science program on network television in prime time, and hats off to Dr. Tyson for being committed to broadening our horizons.

But, at least from the first episode, “Standing Up in the Milky Way,” it’s hard to see the new program’s having the impact of the original. Dr. Tyson is genial and comfortable on camera, just as Sagan was. Yet the vehicle he is given doesn’t initially soar the way “Cosmos” 1 did.

That’s true in a basic sense: As in the original version, we are placed in a “ship of the imagination” that rockets through space, with Dr. Tyson as our Captain Kirk. In the new incarnation, the gimmick seems a little hokey, especially when Dr. Tyson is shown sitting Kirk-like, peering out the spaceship’s windshield. The ghosts of all the clunky outer space movies made since 1980 haunt this presentation.