Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (Season 1)

Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1980) is one of the most influential documentary series ever made, and you can watch it online on iFILM. Astronomer Carl Sagan wrote and hosted all thirteen episodes, produced jointly by PBS and the BBC under director Adrian Malone.

The series moves across an enormous range: the origins of life, the death of stars, the destruction of the Library of Alexandria, the possibility of other civilisations, and the specific danger of nuclear arsenals aimed at each other. Sagan's method is personal. He does not lecture — he thinks out loud, with visible enthusiasm for each detour. That tone is why the show has outlasted most science television of its era.

Cosmos holds up not because its data is current but because the underlying project — getting a viewer to feel the scale of time and space and then understand their place inside it — is still rare on screen. People who saw it young often describe it as the reason they went into science. That is a strange thing for a television programme to achieve. Stream all episodes of Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1980) online on iFILM.