Cosmos Studios President and Executive producer Mitchell Cannold (left) and Astrophysicist Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson.


San Diego – National Geographic Channels International (NGCI) announced at Comic-Con the global launch of Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, the new series from executive producer/ writer Ann Druyan and executive producer Seth MacFarlane. NGCI will align its international premiere with the series launch on FOX and National Geographic Channel in the U.S. in spring 2014.

MacFarlane (Family Guy, American Dad) has teamed with Carl Sagan’s original creative collaborators – executive producer/ writer Druyan and co-writer and astronomer Steven Soter – to conceive a 13-part series, combining drama, fantasy and natural reality, as a successor to the Emmy Award- and Peabody Award-winning original series.

Executive producer Brannon Bragaserves as the primary director of the series, with cinematographer Bill Pope also directing. The new Cosmos will feature animated sequences with guest voices from MacFarlane and an array of talent to be announced.

“There’s never been a more important time for Cosmos to re-emerge than right now. I want to make this so entertaining, and so flashy, and so exciting that people who have no interest in science will watch just because it’s a spectacle,” said MacFarlane.

“It’s a thrill to take the Ship of the Imagination out for another spin,” added Druyan. “We are going places none of us have ever been before, using capabilities that just didn’t exist back when we were making the original series. All that, and yet it feels so much like the first time.”