Why we believe in science too much to watch Cosmos.

The reboot of the Cosmos television series just ended, and despite a ton of publicity, lots of money, and being broadcast on ten Fox television channels, the series still didn’t do well. Some scientists may be tempted to conclude that this is more proof that the public cares less about science than ever before, since in 1980 the first Cosmos with Carl Sagan was a big hit. But are they right? I don’t think so, in fact, I think that the public does believe in science – and that is why Cosmos couldn’t be a big hit today, but it was 35 years ago.

I should admit that I have a slight connection to the Cosmos series – the first one, not the second. In the early ‘90s, I was a budding documentary film maker, working as a writer on a science series about Nobel Prize Winners ( The Nobel Legacy). My boss was Adrian Malone, the executive producer of the first Cosmos series. I heard a lot about Adrian’s dealings with Carl Sagan ( often fractious), and how the show was produced. It was a time when big-budget, 13-part series about serious subjects were more common, and attracted lots of attention. When Cosmos aired on PBS in September of 1980, it received 8.7million viewers in America’s four biggest cities ( that’s how ratings were calculated back then). Cosmos became proof that PBS could produce a ratings hit, and Adrian hoped that he could do it again with our series ( no such luck).

Television was changing in the early 1990s, in ways that would ultimately affect how the next Cosmos series would fare in 2014. I was living in Boston in 1992, and when I went home after work, I watched some of the new cable channels. One of them was TLC, known as The Learning Channel back then. It had just been bought by The Discovery Channel network. I rather liked TLC, since it was basically a PBS and BBC reruns channel, full of fascinating serious documentaries.

But during the 1990s, TLC discovered that science and history shows were not going to get big ratings. However, one kind of show did really interest people: home renovation programs. So, the channel slowly drifted away from science, towards lifestyle shows. Home and personal makeover shows became big hits, followed by shows about atypical people like dwarves, people too fat to get out of bed, and tons of shows about aliens and paranormal events. Science was out, the bizarre was in. This format worked so well, other channels, including the big broadcasters, started producing their own big budget versions of these shows.

When Cosmos came back in 2014, it was facing this new television universe. There were three other shows that were its main competition for most of its run: The Good Wife, Resurrection and Believe. Resurrection is a new fictional series about people who come back from the dead, while Believe is a new J.J.Abrams vehicle which follows a little girl who has paranormal powers. So, in 2014, two of Cosmos’ top competitors were shows about superstition. It lost to both of them, as well as to The Good Wife. In 1980, by contrast, Cosmos was up against Archie Bunker’s Place ( a sitcom), Charlie’s Angels and CHiPs . Not an alien or zombie in sight. In 2014, Fox aired Cosmos on all ten of its channels (for example, FX, and its news channels), and the show still only got a maximum of 8.5 million viewers. Back in 1980, it got slightly more than that in just four major cities ( the way ratings were calculated back then), so in the U.S. as a whole, far more people watched it in 1980 than in 2014.

So does this mean that we are slipping back into an age of superstition, where science is no longer considered true? No. I think we all understand that our televisions, mobile phones and ipads are made possible by science. But - and this is a big but-  we don’t feel like we have any say about what happens in science. It is something produced by experts, who know way more than us, and we will never catch up. And that is a problem for making a hit television show.

Far from being dismissive of science, we’re more like medieval peasants who walk into those huge, beautiful cathedrals. They were in awe, and knew that what the Church said was The Absolute Truth, and not to be messed with. You couldn’t start telling stories about Jesus where he had a wife and kids, you know, for fun. Not an option, since what the bible and the priests were saying was simply fact, no room for debate or alternate versions. The same is true for science today. There’s no point in making up stories about the laws of physics, as if there is some wiggle room there. The universe has laws that can’t be broken or distorted. So we approach science as something that is true and it works, even if we don’t know why. So a show like Cosmos deserves our respect. It may fill us with wonder and awe, but we know that our opinions don’t matter in any way.

The paranormal shows Cosmos was up against don’t have this problem. Their plot lines are flexible, they can make up the rules as they go along, keeping the audience guessing. Few of us would stand around the water cooler talking about the laws of physics, but we happily talk about some show we saw about aliens, or the latest superpowers a character on True Blood or Heroes has acquired. It is like sports: we feel fully qualified to diss a player who makes millions of dollars a year. We feel we have the right to heckle. That’s why watching shows like Honey Boo Boo or Duck Dynasty is fun: their characters are different from us, and we can gossip about them.

That kind of talk doesn’t work for astronomy. Our human instinct for telling stories, for exaggeration and gossip just doesn’t come into play if you believe something is the absolute truth. It does work for superstition, though, which is why serious science shows like Cosmos will rarely do well in the ratings anymore. We have become used to seeing television as an arena where we can heckle, so a serious science program is not going to attract a big audience, unless there is a human element we can engage with. Or, to put it another way, it is not that we don’t believe in science anymore, it is because we believe it so much that we will keep being attracted to superstition, and subjects which are thoroughly unscientific.