A top a small hill south of Santa Fe, New Mexico, just far enough east of Interstate 25 be obvious from the highway, large multistory structure. Its adobe-like earth tones and setback style remind you of the great Southwest pueblos. But something far more modern is going on there. This is Santa Fe Studios, built in 2011 and home to a variety of movie and television productions, all part of New Mexico’s burgeoning filmmaking industry.

We visited there one day recently to see Ann Druyan, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and colleagues filming the second season of their television science series Cosmos. The first Druyan-Tyson Cosmos (Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey) aired in 2014 to much acclaim. (In addition to its other honors, our Committee for Skeptical Inquiry gave it CSI’s Robert P. Balles Prize in Critical Thinking.) That series was of course a fresh incarnation of Carl Sagan’s original blockbuster Cosmos series and book of 1980. Sagan and Druyan were husband and wife, and they worked together on that original series. So in a way, the new thirteen-episode Cosmos: Possible Worlds, to premier on multiple Fox and National Geographic Channels in the United States and at least 171 other countries in Spring 2019, is the third incarnation of the Cosmos brand, all with Sagan-esque origins and style.

Santa Fe Studios.

Photo by Kendrick Frazier

With all this luminous history in mind, we somewhat nervously step inside the vast studio building. Vanessa Goodwin, Druyan’s assistant, shows us around. First stop is the Art Department. There in a large open room artists work at desks and computers surrounded by walls filled top to bottom with photoboards of what is to be filmed. Hundreds of oversize images of everything from ancient Mesopotamian cities to today’s Amsterdam to future interstellar spacecraft adorn the walls. Tyson appears in the middle of some of them, but he’s CGI’d in. The filming hasn’t been done yet. The sites in Europe and elsewhere haven’t been visited. Virtually every scene of all thirteen episodes is pictured, or at least plausibly envisioned, on these walls. This is essential in planning something so complex, Goodwin points out.