YMMV / Cosmos

• Awesome Music:
  • The theme tune, and most of the background music. It's by Vangelis, after all. Also, the Symphony of Science auto-tune Voice Clip Songs all contain remixed Cosmos scenes, of which one is almost entirely based on Cosmos.
  • Here's the "Pale Blue Dot" monologue coupled with a Snoop Dogg instrumental. ^note The two men have more in common than you might think.
  • Alan Silvestri's music for the new version isn't anything to sneeze at either (the producers initially approached him to only write the theme music, but Silvestri was so impressed with the first episode that he signed to score the entire series). The Emmys certainly agreed, as Silvestri won for his theme music and his score for the first episode (it should be noted that this was his first ever nomination).
• Better on DVD: For starters, you don't have to listen to Tyson calmly and expertly debunk climate change denialism and the shady practices of the auto industry, then go to commercial break and watch slick commercials for oil companies and auto makers.
• Broken Base:
  • The 2014 series has been accused of going out of its way to attack religion, particularly the first episode's lengthy tangent on the life of Giordano Bruno. Tyson has responded that he has no problem with religion itself, only its practitioners who are too narrow-minded to consider the validity of science. Subsequent episodes bear this out by various neutral and positive mentions of religion (Tyson speaks highly of the Golden Age in the medieval Islamic world) and demonstrating how scientists themselves can be biased to downright unethical, like Dr. Robert Kehoe's work for the lead industry.
  • There are those who believe the show should be much, much more stringent about science, and those who think it should stay the way it is, usually as part of a debate on appealing to the masses.
• Genius Bonus:
  • In the reboot's CGI animation of DNA replication, one strand of the DNA helix is replicated without interruption. The other is not; the "gears" give this strand a shake at regular intervals. This is the leading strand and lagging strand, respectively.
  • The Ship of the Imagination's portholes to the past and future are rimmed in red and blue, respectively. The doppler effect causes objects moving away from us to be shifted red, and those moving toward us blue.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • During Sagan's discussion about chemical elements in "The Lives of the Stars", he makes a Running Gag about how nobody's ever heard of elements like yttrium or praseodymium; the series was made two years before personal computers became commonly available. Yttrium and praseodymium are among the rare earth elements, and today they're of enormous economic, strategic and geopolitical importance to electronics manufacturing.
  • Possible Worlds' very depressing episode about Nikolai Vavilov originally aired on NatGeo on March 16, 2020, right at the beginning of COVID-19 lockdowns in the United States.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "Billions and billions", or any other -illion, said in Sagan's characteristic way. Actually he never said "billions and billions" in the show, but he acknowledged it in his final book.
  • Animated GIFs of Tyson entering the black hole used as reaction to something cringe-worthy.
  • The Pale Blue Dot.
• Most Wonderful Sound: The original Cosmos is known as much for Sagan's sonorous voice as for being a groundbreaking educational program.
• Narm:
  • Tyson entering the black hole with Jitter Cam and mouth agape.
  • The incredibly garish, Phong-shaded CGI of the chlorophyll production line. It's like the Ship of the Imagination went back in time to have it rendered in the mid-90s.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Given that the first half of "Sisters of the Sun" is about Cecilia Payne and Annie Jump Cannon breaking ground for women and the injustice that most non-astronomers haven't even heard of them, and that subsequent episodes feature women scientists in their animated segments, it's a little odd that Caroline Herschel was only shown in a picture montage at the end rather than in the episode about her brother and nephew. Caroline's work alongside William was so notable that she was the first woman in England to be paid for her scientific work, so she at least merits a name-check.
  • Fixed in Cosmos: Possible Worlds, which talks a little about her, including the aforementioned fact.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Sometimes concepts they had covered in previous episodes and could reference are dropped. For instance they spent an episode covering plate tectonics, and then in the next episode discussed the discovery of Earth's magnetic field. When magma cools the metals follow magnetic field lines - it was the discovery that some rocks were no longer pointing to the magnetic north pole which became the Smoking Gun proving continental drift, however this was never brought up. Chalk up another "thank you" to Faraday!
• Ugly Cute: Tardigrades! Just look at them swim through that dewdrop!
• Unintentional Period Piece:
  • In the third episode Sagan is shown picking up a copy of the New York Post which announces "THE BEATLES ARE BACK!". John Lennon was murdered two months after the episode first aired.
  • The episode where Sagan explains how the Voyager data was received and collected now doubles as a fascinating portrait of the state of computer technology in The '70s. Data was collected on "magnetic disks, much like a phonograph record."^note For completeness, that is also the way the Voyager probes record data (still to this day, more than 40 years after launch) before sending it to Earth
• Visual Effects of Awesome: In the Neil deGrasse Tyson version, some of the effects of both the starship and the imagery on offer are absolutely gorgeous.

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