The Awesome Show will be hosted by Chris Hardwick. Image: Jordin Althaus/AMC

Sometimes it feels like every new television show fits into a specific, well-explored genre. But not The Awesome Show. That’s the name of a new NBC series that will explore and highlight the latest advances in science and technology.


Variety reports six episodes of the show have been ordered and it’ll be hosted by, who else, Chris Hardwick.

“The opportunity to develop a primetime show that celebrates science and technology was too good to pass up,” Hardwick said in a news release. “I started Nerdist 10 years ago as a tech news site. I was a contributor to Wired magazine for several years and hosted ‘Wired Science’ on PBS. It is very important to me to make something that positively promotes these topics in order to share humanity’s triumphs, to instill hope for our future and to inspire the next generation of young thinkers.”


And I think that’s the key point here: NBC is going to have a primetime show about advances in science and technology. That’s the kind of subject that’s usually either relegated to deep cable channels or deemed so unimportant, it barely makes a blip through all the political turmoil and violence that dominates the news. The fact that The Awesome Show will occupy a prominent time slot on NBC is a nice change of pace—and maybe it will get viewers excited about the kinds of things that will actually help improve the world in a bipartisan way.

No premiere date has been set.

[Variety]