“bill nye Saves the World” has dropped at Netflix and, according to Gizmodo, the resulting product is not promising. A lot of it consisted of the bow-tied clad former children’s TV star yelling at the audience about climate change and vaccinations. For a program that is supposed to be science oriented, the show eschews a lot of intelligent discussion of complex subjects for a cartoon version of a cable news panel show.
Mores the pity, because the American television watching public is in great need of some Science Education. Unfortunately, we seemed to have devolved from Carl Sagan explaining everything from the wonders of space exploration to evolutionary biology to Bill Nye bellowing at his audience and setting up people on panel discussions to be humiliated because they just might think climate change is an overblown controversy.
Then there was the cringe-worthy segment featuring the performance artist Rachel Bloom, which is alleged to be about the scientific method and is shown below. It indicates that “Bill Nye Saves the World” is very little like “Bill Nye the Science Guy” that graced the 1990s, more HBO than PBS.
Nye, who was recently co-chair of the March for Science lacks the quality of self-awareness that is crucial for someone who proposes to be someone who makes a living on television. Otherwise, he would not have allowed himself to be rhetorically beaten up by Tucker Carlson on Fox News recently. Most people who have been so used would have gone on a retreat with some top flight media experts to discuss the reasons for that failure and how to avoid it in the future.
It’s not as if science can’t form the basis of a TV show in an entertaining manner. “Mythbusters” taught a lot of science for over a decade with lots of explosions, gunfire, gooey substances, car crashes, and falls from great heights. Adam, Jamie, Kari, Tori, and Grant likely did the cause of science education more honor in a single episode than Nye will do in his entire career.
Even when touching on anti-science beliefs, like the “we never went to the moon” conspiracy theory, the Mythbusters destroyed the myth by doing actual experiments, not by having a true believer on and yelling at them. We can only hope that the next generation “Mythbusters” will be able to carry on the tradition with as much panache.
Meanwhile, Bill Nye needs to go away to some place quiet and think about his life and what he is doing with it. So far it has not been very edifying.
