The Universe 2007

I am about half way through this show and it is getting more and more difficult to keep my attention up.

It started really good with interesting and understandable topics that were well presented. During the course of the second season it already became repetetive. Repetition can be a good thing in terms of learning but it can also become very boring. How often do you need to hear what killed the dinosaurs or that asteroids do collide in the solar system? You get the feeling they didn't know what to talk about which is hard to believe if you have The Universe as your title.

Graphics and CGI are used over and over again serving different topics. It was literally the same footage with a different commentary. It drifts more and more towards fictionous content with a strong tendency towards sensationalism and dramatization. Episode intros are edited out of context to amp up the dramatic effect. Attention grapping voice overs that repeatedly descride doomsday scenarios, and footage of cities being destroyed. Than you learn in the episode that those scenarios, while likely, are not a given, and anyway hundreds of thousands if not millions of years in the future. Who knows if humanity is still around. Is it not possible to explain science without turning everything into apocalypse? The educational aspect takes a backseat in later seasons. A lot of things become countdowns like "the biggest this" and "the greatest that". While I don't doubt the expertise of the scientist experts, it seems they were choosen more by their looks than anything else. And if you watch similar documentaries you know a lot of them allready and it seems they are making a living from appearing on TV. Which is OK, after all it's a profession that may not be paying huge sums of money.

I am now into S7 and there were some interesting episodes but a lot of times it's scientist performing dramatic looking experiments and said countdown shows.

It degrades more and more the further it went along. By season 8 it has basically become a kind of ancient mystery show. In fact in says in the subtitle to that season "Ancient Mysteries Solved" which it does not. It makes the same old hypothesis you've probably heard elsewhere and not adding anything new. A lot of that being guesswork. And while science is by definition forming a theory and than proofing it, the part where they are trying to proof it is where it lacks.

In the end there are many different documentaries about astronomy and I would not count this among the better ones.