Let me first preemptively say that I am not very good at science. I love watching experiments and occasionally participating in them, but if you ask me to take a class, I will probably not do so great. However, I firmly believe that there is one person who is responsible for fostering my love of science. Make that two people. One was my 5th-grade teacher, who had a habit of putting on the show of the person who really made me love science: Bill Nye.
With the TV show “Bill Nye the Science Guy” ending almost 19 years ago, Bill Nye has come back, and he is on a new mission: to save the world.
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I loved the original show. The excitement of waiting for Bill to open the door that says, “NYE Laboratories” to reveal the building or location that Bill was at in order to introduce the science topic or issue that the episode was going to cover. There was the “Nifty Home Experiment” segment, the “Cool Science Trick” segment, and everyone will never forget the ending parody of a song that covered the topic of the episode. Now with the new show, Bill has somewhat consolidated the format of the show and now made it simple for people, whether they were fans of the old show or checking out who Bill Nye is for the first time, everyone can understand what he is talking about. Bill even brings this up in the first episode, as he says “[Bill Nye Saves the World]’s for you grown-up kids all over the world.”
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Since Bill’s show is on Netflix, he is definitely appealing to the base of teenagers and young adults, but he is also letting those parents who may have watched Bill on his old show to experience that same feeling of curiosity that they had when they first watched Bill many years ago to also watch his show too.
I have watched a few episodes of the new show, and I will say that I am quite happy with the layout of the show. Since this is somewhat a “grownups” show, it made sense for Bill to use correspondents and panel discussions to help hammer the point that each specific episode was trying to make. I think Bill was also given a lot of leeway when it came to what exactly it was that each episode was going to cover because you can see the passion and emotion that Bill expresses for each topic. There is even a segment familiar to the old show, “Consider the Following,” called “Bill Needs a Minute.” This is really where Bill gets to speak his mind about what it is that he is thinking about the issue of the episode.
