The mysteries of the universe are captivating American viewers once again in Fox’s “Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey,” more than three decades after Carl Sagan’s original series explored the wonders of space.

Science programming isn’t prevalent on network television, but thanks to producer Seth MacFarlane — the heavyweight behind “Family Guy” and “American Dad” — ”Cosmos” is getting a primetime spotlight on Fox. MacFarlane worked with Sagan’s widow, Ann Druyan, and astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson (who hosts) to develop the “Cosmos” follow-up.

Last week's premiere episode debuted to excellent ratings, and got people buzzing on Twitter about the extraordinary visual storytelling. For that, MacFarlane turned to his longtime animation producing partner, Kara Vallow, and her team at 6 Point Harness studio.

[Photos: Check Out More Images From Fox's 'Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey']

Yahoo TV chatted with Vallow about how those striking animated scenes came to life.

How did you get involved with “Cosmos”?

Seth had been developing this project with Ann Druyan and with Neil Tyson for quite a while. In the original series, the narrative portions of the show that tell the stories of the scientists were done via live-action historical reenactments, and that was their intention with this version, too. But at some point, they decided that was untenable, for a lot of reasons. If you look back at the old show, it worked really well for the time, but it would seem a little unsophisticated today to have actors portraying Giordano Bruno and Einstein.

So Seth had the idea of doing it in animation. This was about a year and a half ago, and they were already well underway on production. I stepped into it midway. I was very reluctant at first to say yes to it, because I was very intimidated by the source material — the sheer scope of it was intimidating to me. It wasn't until after speaking with Ann Druyen at great length, and we came to a consensus about how we were going to approach it, that I said I would give it a shot.

How did you develop the style of animation?

I've been developing television shows here for quite a number of years. I had to expand my mind outside mainstream television animation to think about a visual style that would suit this show, that was more sophisticated and adult, but not overly complicated.

So I watched endless independent animated films. What really appealed to me were films I saw that were sort of less animation and more cut-outs and shadow puppetry, black silhouettes pitched against backgrounds. I started to have a vision of how I could use stylized characters that weren't completely multidimensional.

The first script had this very emotional set piece about Giordano Bruno and his life, and I felt very attached to that and a great amount of responsibility for telling that sensitively and with the necessary emotion. I didn't want the characters to be hyper-realistic. It might come across as hokey.

There’s a very authentic quality to those scenes. They feel very real.

I knew that we were going to have transitions between live-action locations into these animated worlds, and that couldn't be jarring. I didn't want the viewer to be like, "Oh my God, now we're in some cartoon land." So there had to be a way to make semi-seamless transitions and not have them look weird.