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An Astronomer in the Galaxy Cosmos by Carl Sagan, A Personal Voyage (PBS, Sundays, beginning Sept. 28, 8 p.m. E.D.T.). With this 13-part, $8.25 million series, television truly gets down to the stuff of cells and the substance of stars. Each segment has flair, excellent special effects and a dash of good ethical showmanship, thanks to Carl Sagan, 45, the Cornell University astronomer and Pulitzer prizewinner (for The Dragons of Eden).
What if, in Episode 1, viewers travel with Sagan on a hokey Star Wars-style "ship of the imagination" to distant galaxies? The vastness of the universe is brilliantly presented—the trillions of suns, the distances in billions of lightyears. The limited speck called earth is put in its place: the third planet around a middle-aged dwarf star, on one arm of the Milky Way, in a sea of other galaxies.
Episode 1 is light on theme and heavy on overture. But Cosmos soon settles down to its subject. Evolution is explored in detail, along with natural and artificial selection. Viewers take a trip inside a cell to see how DNA reproduces itself. With life's building blocks—simple organic molecules—common throughout the universe, Sagan feels that life must exist somewhere other than earth. But what would it look like? On Jupiter, he shows, it could consist of giant gas-filled living balloons called "floaters," with "hunters" that eat the floaters for survival.
Sagan has been on Johnny Carson's Tonight show so many times that his students have been known to greet him with "Heeere's Carl!" None of that tinsel, though, should take away from Sagan the scientist, one of the first astronomers to estimate correctly the surface temperature of Venus and to recognize that the changing patterns on Mars were caused by wind-blown sands. Nor should it detract from Sagan the teacher. He is a man clearly in love with his subject, and in love with teaching it, who speaks of "exquisite interrelationships" and the "awesome machinery of nature." Sagan is unabashedly awestruck, and he assumes that what interests him will interest his audience. His assumption should prove to be correct, provided that the audience can forget the banality of That's Incredible!, Those Amazing Animals and the rest of what is mislabeled "reality programming."
—By John S. DeMott
A Doctor in the Blood Stream The Body in Question (PBS, Tuesdays, beginning Sept. 30, 9 p.m. E.D.T.). The BBC had an inspired notion when it chose Jonathan Miller to write and host this 13-part medical series. Miller is a physician and, more important, a veteran of that '60s satire Beyond the Fringe. Miller brings some of the engaging wit and lunacy of that review to the series. In the opening episode, Naming of Parts, he takes to the streets Oxford to ask passers-by about the location and size of internal organs. In Blood Relations, red automobiles career over roadways to show how red blood cells travel the circulatory system. Best of all is the staged encounter between doctors and a man hospitalized for abdominal pains in Try a Little Tenderness. The daffy sequence illustrates the complexities making a diagnosis while capturing the ignominy of being a patient.