The Most Important Cosmos Review You'll Read This Week

"So, that's the science show with space pictures. What did you think of it, honey?"

"Science. Space pictures. Awesome!"

Our umpteenth winter storm of the season delayed school two hours this morning, which is kind of the worst of all possible worlds from a parenting perspective-- when the schools are closed, there's (usually) a snow-day day-care program, but they don't take kids during a mere delay. On the bright side, though, it gave me a chance to show SteelyKid the Cosmos reboot from Sunday night. Her capsule review is at the top.

In a little more detail:

-- I asked her if she wanted to see a show about space, and she said "My class isn't talking about space any more, but I'd like to watch, because space is really cool."

-- The bits with Tyson talking at the very start didn't do much for her, but the credit sequence got a couple of "Wow!" reactions.

-- During the tour of the solar system sequence, she pointed out that there's a dwarf planet in the asteroid belt (Ceres), said "Wow!" at the Great Red Spot, and correctly identified Uranus and Neptune before the narration named them.

-- "Daddy, is it cold at Saturn?"
"Well, deep in the atmosphere, it's probably warm, but if you're out by the rings, yeah, it would be really cold."
"Really, really cold. You'd need to wear a hundred jackets!"

-- The "golden record" audio while showing Voyager I got a puzzled "There's music in space?"

-- The "rogue planet," the galaxy in infrared, the Virgo supercluster, and the observable universe all got "Wow"s. The bubbling multiverse got a delighted/amazed "What?!?!"

-- The Giordano Bruno section opens with an animation of a geocentric universe, and she was outraged about that. "That's wrong! The Earth goes around the Sun! It takes a day for the Earth to rotate, a year for the Earth to go around the Sun, and a month for the Moon to go around the Earth."

-- Aside from that, the historical sequence was kind of lost on her. She was more interested in the commercial for Rio 2 in one of those breaks.

-- The "cosmic calendar" sequence went a little over her head, but she liked some of the dates. She was particularly pleased that the Sun's "birthday" is August 31, because her birthday is in August. The animated Tiktaalik got an amazed/puzzled noise.

All in all, her reaction was about what I would've expected. The cool CGI visuals really fascinated her, and she picked up on some of the space facts. The Carl Sagan stories didn't work for her at all. Which is pretty much what you would guess given that she's five...

The "next week" promo looks like it will be mostly evolution-of-life stuff, not so much space things. It'll be interesting to see how she reacts to that. But on the whole, I would say that it was reasonably successful at appealing to the little-kid set. Which I'm sure Fox will be relieved to hear...