10 Shows You Didn’t Realize Were By Seth MacFarlane
3. Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey & Possible Worlds
Unless you are a Seth MacFarlane diehard fan, you may not realize he also has a flair for science in addition to his taste for crude comedic animation.
His science-fiction affliction has always been apparent, especially with the Star Wars episodes of Family Guy and now with The Orville. Still, he wasn’t often tied to more serious scientific productions.
That all changed when he ran into Neil deGrasse Tyson at a kickoff meeting held in Hollywood, California by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) of all things. The goal of NAS was to juxtapose film and television to reconnect audiences with the sciences during a time that saw some people giving them the cold shoulder. MacFarlane expressed his scientific interests and related to Tyson on a number of things, including their love for the 1980s Cosmos series by Carl Sagan.
With the spirit of NAS in mind, the two decided to team up and produce a new version of the show called Cosmos: A Spacetime Oddessy, which was their attempt to introduce a new young audience to astronomy. Even though skeptics doubted MacFarlane, the creator of adult cartoons, could straighten up and produce the show without shoe-horning in his ridiculous antics, critics were impressed by the final result. Cosmos even performed well enough that it had another run later under the subtitle Possible Worlds.