Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey

As a long-time fan of Carl Sagan's works, I am happily gobbling up
the recent Cosmos remake on Fox with Neil deGrasse Tyson (NdT). It
is very well done and NdT was definitely the right person to host
the show.

I'm disappointed with the format, however. They put each episode
into a standard, 42-minute TV 'hour', meaning 18 minutes of
commercials. This is in itself amazing given most people watch TV
via cable, and pay a monthly fee to do so. If I'm paying for cable,
there should be no ads, but I digress. With a show like this, the
breaks are awkward, they really interrupt the flow, the editing
can't hide that. I've seen other placements for ads - like having
them all at the beginning and end of the hour, so at least the show
is uninterrupted. Fox used to do this for the '24' season premieres,
so it's not without precedent, and for an educational show, it
should be the norm.

Apart from that, the show is wonderful. It's good to see science
literacy making a comeback, especially with recent stories about the
rate of evolution denial in the US [0].

[0] http://www.pewforum.org/2013/12/30/publics-views-on-human-evolution

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