This afternoon we had the first formal meeting for product planning of the Science 2.0 television pilot.  

As you can imagine, there was talk of technical details, how the creative guys will set up the shot lists and storyboard the segments, what segments we will use, and then some of the philosophical stuff.

Like, what will make Science 2.0 a science show for the next century?

I told the agency and the producer what a fond recollection U.S. scientists of today have for shows like "Nova" and Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" - but noted that at the time, those were not regarded as stodgy, traditional ways of doing science on television, they were cutting edge.

So if we make try to make "Nova" today, no one is going to watch it, those guys are already doing it better than we can.   It has to be relevant to a new audience not reached by current efforts.   The audience is much smarter than when I watched "Cosmos" - adult science literacy is triple what it was when I graduated college and the science audience is 70 million people - but the science audience is not getting its science from TV as much these days.  The people watching 'science' on TV are mostly watching friggin' Ghost Labs or that Egyptian maniac who claims to be a pharaoh.   Oh, and Shark Week.  Shark Week is cool.

Three years ago, U.S. television executives declared the television situation comedy dead.  Most of the programs then were not very good - when a show like "Two And A Half Men" is the best comedy on television, things are bleak.  Scripted reality was cheaper and more profitable, they said.  Suddenly, and all in the same season three months after the form was declared extinct, we got "Community" and "Modern Family" and "Cougar Town", three brilliant comedies by executives who thought outside the reality TV box.    Now, comedies are back.

So it goes with science.  Just because little great science is on television right now doesn't mean it can't work.   We have multiple entire networks devoted to cooking and people who sort through junk, so if science programming is not working, it isn't because people are stupid, it's because the programming is not appealing enough.

My first concern was hosting the thing; I have trepidation about hosting a show because I feel like I am outside the right age, plus I think I am better being the funny guy writing the parts that can be funny, but they noted Neil deGrasse Tyson is a decade older than me and so we compromised and agreed to have multiple personalities on camera as the topics warranted it.  That seemed to make the most sense.   We can't be the Tosh.0 of science (though we all crack up at his show - a good sign when they know all my movie references and 'get' my examples), we have to balance edginess with quality content.

Then there is a community aspect - Science 2.0 was founded on the idea that independent  forward-thinking scientists want to bypass the old way of impacting policy and educating the public, but that was before Big Media moved into new media.   How can there be engagement with science media people everywhere when their product planning departments see everyone else as a competitor?   I don't want Science 2.0 the television show to be an echo chamber any more than the website is, so the more people outside who are willing to help create a great science show, the better.

Obviously if we end up using four hosts, two of them may be people who are not known to us yet at all, so if you know someone in the northern California area(only) with both science and on-camera experience, I'd like to talk to them.  Send me an email through my profile page, I am not going to have comments enabled on this one.