Universe

This method of popularising (astro)physics seems somewhat unfortunate to me. Roughly a quarter of the runtime of every episode is taken up by CGI and spectacular shots of desolate landscapes with a bombastic soundtrack (the cost of the gratuitous global travel – it’s a show about distant planets and galaxies after all, so the narration could have been recorded in any TV studio – must have swallowed up more of the budget than all of the CGI images of space). Together with Cox’s flowery speech when he waxes poetic about the beauty of the stars and speculates about the existence of extraterrestrials, it should rather inspire the same sense of wonder as a Hollywood blockbuster. For a person who is watching in order to learn something, however, it is mostly an annoying waste of time. The endless scientific facts could be condensed into thirty minutes max in each episode. The rest is ostentatious fluff with a load of metaphors, adjectives and dramatic pauses that together tell us nothing. With a similarly charismatic, erudite and rhetorically gifted host, this is doubly regrettable. But I understand that the BBC wants to keep up with the times (or rather Netflix) and is adapting to trends in its documentary filmmaking. By keeping the show digestible for the broadest possible audience, it remains only on the surface, the informational value is forsaken in favour of “cinematic” spectacle, and style wins out over substance (which mostly consists only of recycled material from other BBC docuseries). (06/08/2023)